Viral Marketing - More Traffic than SEO

Viral Marketing Examples

In short, Viral Marketing is when your existing website visitors, customers, or subscribers refer you to others.

Or, when other webmasters send traffic to your site.

This is the best way to get web site traffic because you have been recommended and others are doing the work for you.

Here's a few examples of viral marketing.

Submitting Articles to Article Archives and eZine Publishers

Submitting articles you have written is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get instant FREE publicity to your web site and is also an excellent way to get links back to your site without linking back.

Free eMail Service

Almost everybody knows about Hotmail. The way they have grown quickly is to include a small ad at the bottom of all users outgoing email. This ad gets more people to open up a Free Hotmail account. These new users send out email and at the same time send out the same ad.

As you can see, the viral effect does not take long to kick in. One person refers 10. Those 10 refer 10 who also refer 10 who also refer 10 and you have 10, 000 new users after only 4 generations of referrals.

If you want to start your own free email service, bigmailbox.com can set you up. It used to be Free. A while ago it costs about 10 cents per user per month. Now there seems to be no prices listed.

The beauty about all this is that it is free advertising.

Free Greeting Cards

Free greeting cards or postcards is another example of viral marketing that works well. Here's how it works.

If you go to yahoo or some other free greeting card service and send a card, your friend does not get the card in their email box. Instead they get an email message with a URL where they can go pick up their eCard. So they go pick up their card and probably bookmark the site and send out an eCard or two themselves.

See how viral marketing is taking effect here as well?

eBooks

In a previous article, we spoke about ebooks and how to create your own. But we did not speak about just how viral an ebook can be.

Free and paid ebooks also generate tons of unique visitors. It is simple. Just sell an ebook with resale rights. The people who purchase resale rights now sell the ebook complete with resale rights. Those new purchasers now go on to sell the ebook as well.

But how does this bring visitors to your site?

Every ebook contains links back to your offer or web site.

That is why many ebook authors are able to get sales for the "Custom Branded Version" of their ebook. The resellers know it is better to sell copies of the ebook with their own links inside instead of promoting other people's links. Learn more about brandable eBooks.

Here is an example of a free brandable eBook with resale rights.

There Are Many Types of Viral Marketing

I know we have not covered all types of viral marketing here but I hope this gives you a general idea.

The only thing you have to decide is which method of viral marketing is good for you. While surfing around the Internet, be aware of the sites you visit and see if there is a viral marketing element involved with the site. Can you do it too?

Some sites use a refer a friend script on their site. They have setup some kind of free service like a Search Engine Submission page. On that page they suggest you either refer it to a friend or link back to them.

Take it easy. Check out which methods are out there. Select the one which suits your personality and you will watch your web traffic grow quickly.