What is Viral Marketing?

There is no vaccine for viral marketing: if there was one you wouldn"t want to use it since this is a very powerful internet marketing technique that enables exponential growth of the message or result intended by the original seed.

There are a few essential components of an effective viral marketing strategy. The first is that the information or service provided must be free. Everybody likes something for free, and if you provide something useful that is free of charge, and that the recipient can also give away free of charge, you have the beginning of a viral system. The reason it should be free is that it will proliferate far quicker than if it costs money.

Let"s say you give away a free Ebook with your URL in it to ten people. It"s odds on that most of these ten will open it since it costs nothing, and if the contents of the Ebook is useful to them, there is an almost certainty that at least 50% will open it. If each of the five that send out the Ebook to ten of their friends, or ten people on their email list, and again 50% open it, your URL has exposure to 5 x 5=25 people. The same again and it rises to 5 x 5 x 5=125 people being exposed to your URL. All from one emailing to ten people.

The URL could be simply a link to your website or it could be something they can purchase. It doesn"t take a genius to work out where the "viral" comes in, and that after a few repetitions you have thousands then hundreds of thousands of people potentially seeing your message from your initial mailing of only ten. If, instead of ten, that initial mailing had been a thousand. . .

Let"s assume that the purpose of your marketing strategy is to promote a product. Another essential aspect of viral marketing is that the product, or your organization, must be adaptable to mass sales. An electronic product, delivered electronically by autoresponder is ideal. You order can be processed and delivered without any human intervention, and scale is generally not a problem. You don"t need to take on extra staff to pack boxes or stuff envelopes as you rate of business increases by factors of ten.

The product must be such that it feeds on natural human greed and a desire to be wanted, understood or just plain successful. Your product must satisfy these normal human emotions. Thus, "cheap dog kennels" will be less of subject for viral marketing than "how to explode your business profits into the stratosphere".

Another essential for a successful viral marketing program is that it must be able to be distributed by the usual communication methods used by people on the internet. Hence, the written word is more easily distributed round the globe than a verbal message. One day this may not be the case, but it is so now. Distribution by email, forum and blog is better than voicemail.

So how do you set up a viral marketing project? First of all you need an objective: something to sell, or something to advertise. When all is said and done, the ultimate of any marketing strategy is to make money. Whether your viral marketing strategy is a means to achieving this, or is selling a product directly, is immaterial. Let"s say that your objective is the product. It may be simply a URL that you want distributed to generate traffic and provide one way links back to your website, or it may be an affiliate link embedded in a product that is offered inside an Ebook. It doesn"t make any difference.

You then have to persuade people to read your email or click to download your free ebook. If you cannot get people to accept a free ebook from you, then you should think again about your choice of career: perhaps marketing and selling is not the thing for you.

Viral ebooks are the most common type of viral marketing involved. If you can get your message understood by those who read your email or ebook, then they will want to do what you are doing. That is when they make that click to purchase that opportunity. And that is what you will probably do if you are interested in making money online. This is the way to go; lots of people make money with it, so go with the flow.

Viral marketing is legitimate and provides something of worth. It is not like MLM marketing where eventually somebody has to lose their money. The most money you can lose is zilch and the most you can make is limitless. It"s a no-brainer must-have situation that nobody can lose from.

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