5 Ideas for Viral Marketing

No matter how many times I talk about Viral Marketing and even share some of my own viral marketing pieces, I continue to receive emails from people who don’t understand the value of viral marketing. More importantly it seems the majority of my clients lack the creativity needed to produce their own viral marketing pieces.

Because of this and because this blog’s goal is to both inform and educate, here are five ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:

1.    Purchase the branding rights to a viral ebook or acquire a white label ebook to which you own republishing or “master” rights. Allow people to give away your free ebook to their friends, colleagues or web site visitors. Then, their friends or colleagues or web site visitors will also give your free ebook away. This will just continue to spread your free ebook and possible ad all over the Internet creating brand or web site awareness in turn resulting in added traffic to your web site.

2.    If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, do so ASAP. Forums and bulletin boards are great tools that produce inbound awareness. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website. Some people don’t have one. Simply include your banner ad at the top of the board to rise awareness and drive traffic to your web site.

3.    Do you have a knack for web design? Create some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice intact. You can also require users to register to your site before they can download free graphics. Use your member database in your email marketing campaign and watch your revenue grow according to your member list size.

4.    Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their ezine, newsletter, magazine or ebooks. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article. There are countless web sites that rely on volunteer writers such as yourself. Simply Google the term “free articles” and see for yourself!

5.    You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for those products that provide “branding rights”, “private label rights” or “white label rights”. That is where you can include your own name, website, and contact information.

Any way you slice it, there are many ways to generate awareness to your web site using viral marketing. The ideas above barely scratch the top of the endless possibilities available today. Whatever you do, do something! Even a mediocre viral piece is better than nothing…