Viral Marketing Tips 101
Viral Marketing Overview
What is viral marketing and how can you use it to build and expand your business?
Viral marketing is a marketing concept designed to market your business, service or product, exponentially, without your involvement, once it has been implemented. One of the first viral marketing campaigns on the Internet was Hotmail. Quite a successful viral marketing campaign, don’t you think? Hotmail’s viral marketing campaign was pretty simple. They included a small text blurb, with a link, at the bottom of every email sent from the Hotmail email service asking people to sign up for their own email account.
Any type of marketing that is designed to encourage people to pass on the message can be considered viral. It is a marketing campaign that grows by word of mouth. Another example that you see being used a lot in the internet marketing niche is special reports in PDF format or simple software tools that people can use.
Internet marketers even encourage these reports or programs to be broadcast by allowing people to “bookmark” them. In other words, they can include their affiliate links for any product sales that may result from these free viral marketing tools or reports and will earn a commission for each of these sales. Obviously, a monetary incentive like this will motivate people to pass on the software, game, report, etc. others to check.
The concept of viral marketing is that if people like the content, they will pass it on to their friends and family, whether it is a cool flash game, a funny video, a funny story, etc., which one can pass on to another. The viral “product” includes information about the company, a specific product, etc., usually with a link to a website.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it can be a free or very low cost form of marketing and when you find a winner, like Hotmail, your business can explode almost overnight.
Using viral marketing for your business
A successful viral marketing campaign will create instant buzz about your business, not to mention more customers and sales. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach a large number of people and advertise your existence.
All you need is an idea that people want to pass on to their friends and family.