Viral marketing is a term that has proliferated since the development of the World Wide Web. It didn’t start then, but the Internet has certainly made it a lot easier to do, and do well. What is viral marketing, you might ask? In a nutshell, it’s a form of marketing that manages to take on a life of its own. It manages to spread itself by its own innate built in marketing advantage.

For example, a simple viral marketing technique might be to write a short but highly useful report on a subject that is very much in demand. The report could have a number of links within it that point to various products, or they could be affiliate links for the author. The author then spreads this report as far and wide as possible by giving it away free, and he also allows everyone who gets it to give it away free as well.

He buys initial advertising to promote the report, but before long its popularity takes over and a kind of viral effect begins to drive it. Before long, assuming that it really is a popular report, it will have snowballed into something much larger and greater than its humble beginnings, just like a flu virus, hence the name applied to the technique: viral marketing.

This is a simple example of how a product could be promoted successfully by viral marketing. There are many other, more complicated ways to promote products by viral marketing. It’s really a matter of thinking cleverly out of the box, rather than following the crowd. Someone once said, “If you seek for something original, run as fast as you can away from the crowd.” Viral marketing is a bit like that. It tends to be the original ideas that work best. And when they work well, they really do work!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.