“Viral marketing” is giving something away and letting people pass it on to others. The main goal of viral marketing is to spread your message to as many people as possible without spending money on advertising.

To start an effective viral marketing campaign, you need to give people a reason to share their information. For example, jokes are often passed just because they are funny. However, how often have you forwarded an e-book ad to other people? Unless you were an affiliate of that ebook, you probably never felt it in one person.

So when you think about using online viral marketing to get free traffic for your website, get creative! Think of the various reasons a person would have for getting your message across. Giveaways are a great way to use viral marketing online. Give something to your visitors, customers and mailing list and let people give away and use your free product or service to quickly multiply your marketing across the Internet. The idea behind viral marketing is that you include your ad with people giving away or using it.

Below are ten high-impact viral marketing strategies:

1. Write articles that are relevant to your product or service. Let people reproduce your articles on your website, in your e-zine, newsletter, magazine, or eBooks. Include your resource box and article reprints option at the end of each article. If you have an affiliate program, let them include an affiliate ID in the resource box!

2. You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license that allows you to distribute the product for free to other people. Look for those products that provide “brand rights.” That’s where you can include your own name, website, and contact information. Then simply let people use any of these “gifts” as free bonuses for the products or services they sell. Include your ad on all your gifts.

3. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really have a great tool. Let people use your online discussion forum for their own website. Some people don’t have one. Simply include your banner ad at the top of the board. (No way to set up a forum or bulletin board? Some hosting services let you set one up for free simply by using a “plugin” script. For example, you can check out our hosting that includes tons of these services at no additional cost! )

4. If you are using a dedicated server (instead of just using a site hosting account), you can allow people to sign up for a free website on your server. Since you’re giving the space away, request that they feature your banner ad at the top of the site. (Note: Even if you’re using a single hosting account, you may still be able to take advantage of this idea if you can set up unlimited subdomains with your own domain names. Many hosting companies will let you do this for a small, one-time charge. )

5. Set up a reciprocal link directory on your site. There are tons of reliable software programs that are quite inexpensive that make doing this a breeze! Just let people add your link to your free website directory. It only requires them to return a link to your website, advertising your directory. Be sure to provide people with a link from your main pages to access your directory and add your reciprocal link.

6. Allow people to provide your free online service to your websites, visitors, or e-zine subscribers. This could be free email, email consulting, search engine submissions, etc. Your imagination is the limit! Think about this for a while. What do you have that you can give away for free? How about a brief report on your niche? Use the tools you have available (like an autoresponder) to make this even easier to manage.

7. Let people give away your free software. Simply include your commercial within the software program. There are many tools available that allow you to “brand” the software with your contact information and message. Simply pay for these rights and the software is yours for free! However, you can even find some programs that allow you to create your own software. Use the search engines for some ideas.

8. Do you have a hit for web design? Create some templates, charts, etc. and upload them to your site. Then let people give away your graphics, fonts, templates, etc. free web design. Simply include your ad in them or ask people to link directly to your website. Be sure to include a link to your site in the copyright notice as well, and ask them to keep their copyright notice intact.

9. Write an e-book. Allow people to place an ad in your free eBook if, in return, they give the eBook away to their web visitors or eMagazine subscribers.

10. Buy the trademark rights to a viral e-book. Let people gift your free ebook to your visitors. Then your visitors will give it away too. This will simply continue to spread your ad all over the internet.

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