Chances are you probably have came across the term “Viral Marketing” while surfing the internet.

For some, the first impression might be some virus of sorts. But from the view point of an internet marketer, it is a major marketing tool.

According to Wikipedia, Viral Marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.

In layman’s term, Viral Marketing is when you send some marketing message to some audience and this audience find themselves spreading the news about your web site, product or article to even more people.

Take for example, if you have got to know of a interesting story from a office colleague, found it to be very amusing and told your buddies about it over a couple of beers and your friends in turn told their friends about it. Irregardless whether you are aware of it or not, you have effectively participated in some form of viral marketing.

In the real world, viral marketing and promotions is usually done through word of mouth marketing.

But in the online world, viral advertising and promotions may transcend into multiple different forms including interactive video games, video clips, brandable e-books and software etc.

In my view, the key to a successful viral marketing campaigns is to first identify specific individuals or groups of like-minded people with high Social Networking Potential ( aka “hosts” ).

And then create Viral Marketing Campaigns (aka “”Viruses”) that appeal to this people and let the online version of “Word of mouth” advertising like emails, forums, videos clips take its course and help spread the word.

Interesting and amusing topics will definitely have a higher probability of being passed along.

To an internet marketer, Viral marketing can be used to increase traffic to your web site and in turn increase sales from your online business.

Some of the typically used Viral Marketing strategies include the following :

Writing Articles

You can choose to write convincing articles and distribute them freely for readers to view.

A well written article will always be in popular demand and coupled with proper distribution will always somehow find their ways into the hands of interested readers.

At every corner of the internet, there is always a pool of resource hungry web surfers looking for quality content.

And by embedding links within your article back to your website, most readers will be tempted to find out more or share it with friends if the content is good.

Tell A Friend Scripts

You can put a viral marketing script on your website where visitors can enter a friend’s email and click a “Tell A Friend” button.

The script then automatically sends a pre-defined message to the specified email recommending the product, service or website to a friend.

The beauty about this application is that since the email is from a friend, it is more readily accepted.

But the trick is still to get that initial visitor to your site, that is why it very important that you still must have quality content on your web site.

You do not expect a visitor to waste his or her time referring to a friend some useless content or product right?

I have used a viral marketing script like Viral Friend Generator and found it to be quite useful in getting more traffic through the online version of Word Of Mouth advertising.

Tell A Friend Contest

A twist to the “Tell A Friend” program would be to run a “Tell a Friend” Contest where a ” Token” is given to the person who referred the most visitors, the second best, third best and so on.

This token is similar to the concept of a cookie stored on your PC that will be used to track who has send out the most referral emails or invites.

Like i always say, there’s no such thing as a “Free Lunch”, most visitors to your web site value their time and are most probably aware that the internet is full of scams and they rarely want to do something for which they gain nothing in return.

By offering a “Bonus” in return for their efforts is often a must have in order for this method to work.

They get some form of returns for their efforts and you get an increase in traffic to your website, its basically a win – win situation and that’s what a mutually beneficial business should be all about.

Re-brandable Free Giveaways

You can facilitate viral marketing by giving away free stuff such as Free Reports, E-Books, softwares etc.

The catch here is two-fold.

Firstly, these freebies must be of certain quality, it should be “Good” enough that one would be compelled to share with a friend or colleague.

The second is that these reports and e-books must be re-brandable.

Basically, the content of the report or e-book may be from a Private Label Right (PLR) source but the links within the content should be “re-brandable” to include your personal links to your preferred sites.

Video Clips

Video clips in my opinion is one of the most effective viral marketing mechanism on the internet, just look at the immense popularity of youtube.

And with audio / video equipments getting cheaper with advancements in technology, many people are able to utlilise this technology to increase the effectiveness of their viral marketing campaigns.

Nowadays, most hand phones and laptops are equipped video recording functions that make this hugely effective tool even more accessible to the general masses.

But again, the catch here is not just create an eye catching video presentation, but also to subtly include links at the start and end of the video clip to further entice viewers to visit your site.

You can’t imagine how often this is forgotten or left out, huge waste of efforts if you get my drift.

And if you have no idea how to make a video, here a link you might find useful “How to make a video clip”.

To conclude my list of recommended viral marketing tips, here an amusing video clip of a spoof of Star Wars on the topic of “Viral Marketing”.

Enjoy!