Viral Marketing

The words viral advertising and viral marketing are reffering to those marketing techniques which make use of preexisting social networks to increase brand awareness or to acomplish other objectives (marketing wise) through self replicating viral processes, like computer viruses for example. Those may be in form of games, video clips, images, ebooks, text messages etc. In short viral marketing is when other webmasters are sending traffic to your website.

Webmail
Take Hotmail for example. They’ve grown so quickly because everytime someone sent an email a small add was added automatically at the bottom so more people found out about this service and opened a new free account themselves. If every user refers 10 other, after just 4 generations of such refferals they got 10.000 new ones.

Postcards
Greeting cards are another example of viral marketing that still works. If one accesses a free greeting card service and sends it, the receiver doesn’t get the actual postcard in the box but an email with the link to it. Clicking the link redirects the user to the respective site and maybe it will send some himself.

Article Archives
You can get free publicity for your web site without even linking back by submitting articles written by you to article archieves and ezine publishers. This is one of the fastest and easiest way to get traffic.

Ebooks
Ebooks also can get you lots and lots of unique visitors, no matter if they’re free or paid. If you sell an ebook with resale rights, those who bought it can also resell it with those rights and so on. Every ebook contains links back to your site or offer. That’s the reason why so many authors are able to get sales for the custom branded version of their ebook.

Instant Messaging
Maybe the fastest growing way of transmission, hyperlinks are sent over i. m. servers like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, ICQ, AIM, mIRC etc. Because people tend to trust links sent by friends by instant messages than those sent by email this method is quite popular.

Web Sites
Lots of the articles published online now have a button / link that reads Send to a friend or something like that. You can just post an article in a single website and still get a nice number of visitors.

Reward for Refferal
Every now and then a marketing company offers some kind of reward for customers that refer it to others. This way more people are encouraged to use any of the methods presented above.

Word of Mouth
Last but not least, the traditional way of passing on messages to another individuals. Most of the times is also the most reliable method.

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