While “viral marketing” may sound like something hackers and spammers might be doing, it is actually a good marketing technique for your online business. It is marketing yourself in such a way that your business is spread around exponentially through mediums such as eBooks, podcasts, forwarded emails, and more. Just like a virus is spread from person to person, your advertising is spread from person to person.

How Viral Marketing Works

When done correctly, viral marketing can be very cost-effective and easy to implement. To get started, take a moment and think about your target market and what they would find helpful. To get the most out of your viral marketing, try to create something that your target market would enjoy so much they would want to share it with their friends. Hopefully, the people they share it with will also share it with their friends, and so forth.

For example, if you sell food related items, you could create a special report on creating gift baskets. On the cover page as well as the last page of your report, you could include your logo and website address. You could also use this same report as a “freebie” to encourage sign-ups for your newsletter. Once people sign up for your newsletter, you can send them a link that will allow them to download the special report. You can let them know that they can forward the report to family and friends.

By doing this, you will increase the size of your mailing list, and if the people on your mailing list find your special report to be helpful, they will send it to other people. Since your website URL is on the report, the people who received the report as a forward may become curious and visit your site, which will increase your website traffic.

The key is to keep everything very helpful and light. If you created something that was blatantly advertising your business, some people may automatically disregard the product and will decide not to send it to anyone else. This defeats the whole process of viral marketing.

Some other viral marketing ideas are as follows:

eCourse: An eCourse is similar to a special report, except that it is broken down into several days and each day a new “lesson” is delivered to the subscribers’ email. These can work great as they allow you to contact a person several times and offer them something different each time contact is made.

eBook: An eBook is longer than a special report, and it is something you could potentially charge people money for. However, if you want to use it as a promotional item, it can definitely work very well.

Top 10 List: Some people do not have time to read an eBook and just want the “Cliff Notes” of a particular topic. A Top 10 list can serve this purpose. For example, depending on whom your target market is and what type of products you sell, you could create list of secret ways to save money on your next vacation or tips on how to get baby to sleep through the night.

Start Off Gradually

By focusing on at least one of these to start, you can gradually build a strong web-presence for your business. As you begin to see results from one, branch out and try another marketing tool. The great thing is, you don’t have to write it yourself. Get private label content to help you get started or help as you start to grow your efforts. By adding things to your e-newsletter that people find interesting of or use, they are more likely to pass it on to others, thus instantly increasing your customer base. Content is important to any site or newsletter, make sure you leverage what you have and make it work for you.