Simply put, Viral Marketing is when your existing website visitors, customers, or subscribers refer you to others. In other words you give something away for free and allow people to pass it on to others. For example, your contacts know about you and your site and they pass that information on to someone else.

When brainstorming for viral marketing ideas a good route to go is to solve a problem for current or future customers. One benefit of creating something that solves a problem is people will be more likely to spread it to friends, family and colleagues. They will also bookmark the resource or tool.

Look at how successful hotmail’s viral marketing campaign has been with the simple inclusion “Get Your FREE hotmail account at http:www//hotmail.com”. Today they  boast over 280M users!

Submitting articles you have written to places like ezinearticles.com, associatedcontent.com etc., is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get instant FREE publicity to your website and is also an excellent way to get links back to your site without linking back.

E-books, another great viral marketing tool, can be targeted to any audience simply by choosing the right topic of the e-book for that particular market. Let’s say you write an e-book that was focused on “How to Make Your Own Dog Food” and give it away from free, the number of people that would eagerly accept this information could be phenomenal!

Viral marketing may be one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to market a product or service, but achieving success remains more of an art than a science. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of viral marketing is that you can spend a lot of time and money on what seems like a great idea, yet ultimately be faced with disappointing results.  It is therefore critical to do some needs analysis using tools like wordtracker.com or keyworddiscovery.com.

If you go to 123greetings.com, birthdayalarm.com or some other free greeting card service and send a card, your friend does not get the card in their email box. Instead they get an email message with a URL where they can go pick up their eCard. When they collect their card they might even bookmark the website and send out an eCard or two themselves. I use 123greetings.com every now and then to send birthday wishes to friends and I am sure they have caught on to the idea as well.

See how viral marketing is taking effect here as well?

A final point to consider is that calling something ‘viral’ is a catchier way of calling it word-of-mouth worthy. Creating word-of-mouth worthy content won’t bore your readers because what’s worth talking about is, in most cases, high quality.

Here are a few useful viral marketing ideas:

  1. Brainstorm your viral ideasTest each idea on Digg/StumbleUpon/Google Ads
  2. Improve and offer your winning campaign
  3. Set up a forum or other bulletin board if possible
  4. Set up a reciprocal links directory on your site.
  5. Buy resellers rights to an ebook or software
  6. Allow people to give away your software for free
  7. Write an ebook and use it to ‘upsell’. (Upselling is a sales technique where attempts are made to influence a purchase of a more expensive item, upgrade to a paid service or other add-ons)
  8. Starting your own viral marketing campaign with some help from bebiz