Viral Marketing Tips 101

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's been put in place. One of the earliest viral marketing campaigns on the internet was Hotmail. A pretty successful viral marketing campaign, don't you think? Hotmail's viral marketing campaign was quite simple. They included a little text blurb, with link, at the bottom of every email that was sent from the Hotmail email service that asked people to sign up for their own email account.

Any type of marketing that is designed to encourage people to pass along the message can be considered viral. It's a marketing campaign that grows via word of mouth. Another example that you see used a lot in the internet marketing niche is that of special reports in PDF format or simple software tools that people can use.

Internet marketers even encourage these reports or programs to be passed along by allowing people to "brand" them. In other words, they can include their affiliate links for any product sales that might result from these free viral marketing tools or reports and they will get a commission for each of these sales. Obviously, a monetary incentive like this will motivate people to pass along the software, game, report, etc. to others to check out.

The concept of viral marketing is that if people like the content they will pass it on to their friends and family, whether a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story etc., which one may pass on to another. Included in the viral "product" is information about the company, a specific product, etc., usually with a link to a web site. Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because it can be a no cost or very low cost way of marketing and when you hit on a winner, like Hotmail, your business can explode almost overnight.

Using Viral Marketing for Your Business
A successful viral marketing campaign will create in 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 out to a great number of people and announce your existence. All you need is an idea that people would want to pass along to their friends and family.