Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing


How A Viral Marketing Campaign Will Build YourBusiness And Lengthen Your Mailing List



Viral marketing is a marketing technique that uses the freedistribution of information through social networks to produceincreased product awareness. Just as a virus replicates itselfby spreading from person to person (or computer to computer),viral marketing uses the powerful networking resources of theInternet to spread the message about a product by motivatingpeople to pass interesting or amusing information such as textmessages, jokes, games, video clips, on to their friends andcolleagues. Each viral message contains at least one link to the websitethat is behind the campaign. Another example of viral marketing is the placing of affiliate links in e-books. The e-book is theneither given away free or marketed at a huge "discount". Part ofthe packaged includes a "re-branding" offer that allows othersto market the products under their own name. Of course, thee-books come with links back to the main product website. Aspart of the re-branding package, affiliates may replace thelinks in the book with their own affiliate code so that they canearn commissions from sales generated via the books that theygive away or sell. As more and more people take up there-branding offer they spread the word about the e-book in thehope of earning affiliate commissions and so the message aboutthe product spreads like a virus through the Internet.



Another aim of a well planned viral marketing campaign will beto build a mailing list and database of the target market. Inorder to do that, anybody wishing to access the e-book orwebsite is first required to register their name and emailaddress. Thus, a good viral marketing campaign achieves tworesults – a widely advertised product and a massively expandedcustomer mailing list that can be advertised to again and again.It should be noted, however, that the success of a viral marketing campaign depends on the quality of the e-book orsoftware that is being distributed. The agent of the campaign,whether it is an e-book or an online game or free resource,needs to offer some compelling and well constructed content,something the value of which is immediately obvious and whichmakes people eager to pass it on to their respective networks.It has also been found that the inclusion of a request to passthe product on to friends, and an easy method for doing so – asimple form or email link – will increase the success of thecampaign.



A recent example that I was motivated to pass on was a mini"crazy golf" game that was fun to play. I was drawn into thegame, had a good time playing it. As a result, I was keen topass it on to my golfing friends to see how they would fare onthe crazy golf fairway. Even so, I might not have passed it onif there had not been a link built into the site. If you are not up to creating a game, writing and giving away afree e-book is something that anybody can do if they have thetime. For people in a hurry, however, there are a large numberof sources that provide hundreds of good e-books for thispurpose. One that I would recommend is called Viral Marketing Giveaway 9. It is designed for people who either want to startonline businesses or want to grow the businesses they have byharnessing the potential of viral marketing without having towrite their own e-book.


About The Author: David Hurley is the webmaster ofhttp://grasp- the-nettle. com, and writes articles on Internetmarketing strategies. For more information about Viral Marketing Giveaway 9 see: http://hopurl. com/38705.


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