Viral marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your products and/or website.

The power of viral marketing is the ability to leverage on your website visitors to drive even more traffic to your website. Viral marketing gives you unmatched advantage and has the potential to drive massive amounts of free traffic without much effort on your part.

There are many viral marketing techniques that you can use to create a buzz about your website and/or products with little effort on your part.

In this article, I am going to share with you several proven viral marketing techniques.

Sound interesting? It will be even more interesting as you read on:

Viral marketing technique#1: Giveaway rights.

The concept here is to write short informative reports on a topic related to your website and then allow your website visitors and other website owners to give it away.

They could use it as hook to build an email list, as a bonus to their paid products or to their subscribers but it it entirely up to you to decide the extent of the rights advanced to them.

You could also develop website templates, graphics packages, videos,, software, scripts etc and give giveaway rights to them.

Viral marketing technique#2: Rebranding rights

Another practical viral marketing technique is to use rebrandible reports and software to encourage other people to get the word out about your website.

This works by allowing the people that come into contact with your products the ability to rebrand them with their own affiliate links and/or links to other products of their choice, thus giving them the incentive to pass them along.

Viral marketing technique#3: wordpress themes and plugins

This viral marketing technique is hot right now. The concept here is to create wordpress themes and plugins and then find a way to advertise your URL in them. The common way is to have your website Url linked to the wordpress theme name at the bottom of the blogs using the theme.

There is this site I found that uses this viral marketing technique very cleverly to promote their own site and an affiliate program at the same time. What eches.net essentially do is to provide some cool wordpress themes for free, of course with their website url at the bottom. Then at the download page for their free themes they have banners linking to some premium wordpress themes that earn them affiliate commissions. Smart, huh!

Viral markeing technique#4: using online videos

Online videos are increasingly being used by internet marketers to get the buzz out about their website and products.

There are many video sharing sites on the internet today and more and more keep sprucing up every day.

The top among the list is, you guessed, Youtube, actually owned by Google. Most of these video sharing sites are highly trafficked.

Taking the example of Youtube, it has an alexa ranking of three at the time of this writing.

What does that tell you? If you your video is popular, tens of thousands of people (it happens everyday) can view it. What if you had a link to your website somewhere in the video? Can you see the traffic potential?

Some smart marketers are even going to the extent of paying the owners of the popular vidz on youtube to have their links put in the description for the video.

Viral marketing technique#5: Blogging

Blogs were popularized by the youth market; there is no doubt about that. However, what started as a platform for teenage ramblings has since emerged as an important online marketing tool and more andmore businesses are catching up on the power of blogging.

By themselves, blogs are not viral, but with the advent of the modern technologies such as social bookmarking, tagging and ping, a blog (or a blog post rather) can easily go viral. (You damn lucky dude)

Viral marketing technique#6: Etchical bribes

This works by offering a gift to a website visitor if he/she In exchange refers X number of visitors to your website.

You can see this viral marketing strategy at work here and while at it, please refer a few of your friends (shameless me)

Viral marketing technique#7: Resale rights and private label rights

This may sound like a repetition of viral marketing technique number two above (giveaway rights) but I will nevertheless repeat it because it’s so powerful as a viral marketing technique that it deserves a mention.

Resale rights involve creating some product related to the topic of your website and/or products (could even be an affiliate product) and then offering people the right to resell them or even sell the resale rights to them ( in case of master resale rights) in addition to their own personal use.

Private label rights on the other hand allow the holder the rights to claim ownership or authorship to the product by putting their name on the product.

The extent of any rights whether resale or private label rights however varies from product to product.

There is one private label right by a smart marketer that actually got me thinking and nodding. The owner of this cool software advertised another product at the end of the installation instructions (nice catch, huh!).

Viral marketing technique#8: Viral Emails

This viral marketing technique relies on the tendency of internet users to forward funny emails that they come across.

Do you get the picture? Those chain emails that keep making you laugh your head off. The ones that you forward to your friends only to get them back from a friend a while later.

What if you could get creative, design one and have your website URL right inside it? Can you see the potential?

Viral marketing technique#9: Monetary incentives

The most common method under this category of viral marketing techniques is starting an affiliate program.

By offer your affiliates a share of the proceeds from selling your products, you can easily have thousands of affiliate driving traffic to your website

However like I said in the previous post How to unleash the real power of viral marketing in your online business, although affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful and cost effective traffic generation strategies, it’s not the most sustainable method especially for information products.

Viral marketing technique#10: Forums and social networking sites.

Forums and social networking sites can go extremely viral. Most of them allow members to refer their friends and tend to receive much more traffic than normal websites.

Setting up forums and social networking sites I your own niche can, therefore, give you a major leverage and exposure toy your products.

For example, if you are in the dog training niche, you can start a dog-training forum. This is likely to get you tons of targeted buyers for your products since most people in your forum would most likely also be interested in your products.

In conclusion, viral marketing can send you tons of free traffic in record time if you are willing to tap into it. So, get creative .

If you enjoyed reading this article or have any questions or comments about it, please leave them by using the form below.

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Viral marketing, viral marketing, viral marketing! What the heck is this damn little viral marketing thing about?

Viral marketing is undoubtedly one of the biggest buzz words in recent times.

Also known as word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing is one of the most effective forms of online marketing.
Viral marketing works on the premises of giving the visitors to your website a reason to tell their friends about your site, who also tell their friends about it and so on.

In other words, for viral marketing to work for you and your online business, you have to make your website buzz worthy.

In most cases, the buzz worthy bit is something that the referral to your website will find interesting or benefit from or something that justifies the referrer’s effort in getting the word out about your website.

Below are some of the ways in which you make your website buzz worth and extremely viral:

a) Inject some humor

One thing that cannot be disputed is that humor sells. A living proof is Dr. Joe Vitale who created a buzz around his Amazon best seller using humor alone.

That’s what I call free publicity and is an example of what viral marketing can do for your online business if you know how to tap into it.

People love humor and it would be safe enough to say that every one craves for entertainment in their lives.

Thus if you can inject some humor in your marketing messages, it’s very likely to elicit positive feelings among others who might then pass it over and over again without any further effort on your part. That’s viral marketing at its best, right?

b) Dare to be controversial

People love controversy and the most controversial topics receive the most attention. Making some thought-provoking comments is a nice way to generate discussion and interest.

However, you’ll want to avoid offending others by making off-color or too personal comments. Used correctly and sparingly, controversy alone can spur a viral effect on your website.

A nice example is Jason Calacanis who used his celebrity status as the founder of weblogs inc. to say some pretty ignorant stuff about SEO.

We can’t say for sure how much punch this little controversy unleashed on his blog but we’d be safe to assume it was tangible (it just had to)

Such controversy, causing a large group of people (in this case the SEO industry experts) to feel insulted, and feel the need to respond, can trigger a viral effect on your blog.

c) Be unique and innovative

Focus on coming up with new and innovative concepts and ideas and providing fresh look at old ideas.

You see, people get tired of talking about the same tired, old stuff over and over again.

It should thus come as no surprise that some technology and product review blogs are very popular. If you prove to be innovative and provide people with new stuff and ideas to try out, people are likely to feel the urge to get the word out about your website and/or products. That’s viral marketing at its best.

d) Give incentives

There are generally three types of incentives that you can give on your website to trigger a viral effect.

Viral marketing incentive #1-affiliate programs

The most common way to trigger a viral effect on your website is starting an affiliate program. By dividing the income from your products with your affiliates, you provide them with a reason to get the word about your website out.

Now, this is not the most sustainable viral marketing technique (in my own opinion). Why do I say so?

Affiliate programs as a way to trigger viral effect on your website relies on tapping into the human nature of greed (let’s face it, we all want to be rich some day) and if one day you cannot give out monetary incentives or the sales ceases (every product has a life cycle, right?), all the viral marketing effort might simply come to an abrupt break.

However, don’t get me wrong. I don’t intend to mean that an affiliate program is worthless as a viral marketing tool. In fact, by the time it ceases working or by the time the product life cycle ends, you could well have generated a six-figure or seven-figure online business.

What I simply mean is that affiliate programs are not a sustainable viral marketing tool but it’s nevertheless very powerful website promotion strategy.

Viral marketing incentive #2-JV contests

I know I might sound as if I am repeating myself here. I could or I couldn’t, depending on how you look at it, but JV contests are not exactly the same as affiliate programs.

JV contests simply involve running a contest among your affiliates where the top referrer(s) wins a prize. They are also very powerful as viral marketing tools.

Viral marketing incentive #3-free gifts

I personally use and like this viral marketing incentive.

This shameless technique involves asking your website visitors to refer their friends in return for a certain gift. You’d normally tell them something like if you tell only three friends about our website, this $197 product is yours free

Summing up

Viral marketing is one of the fastest ways to generate website traffic and there are many viral marketing techniques you can tap into.
Just get creative and you could easily come up with strong viral marketing mechanisms on your website for free.

Regards,
Kevin Njoroge

The term viral marketing may be taken to imply the use of computer viruses to market your products online. But that is not what it is all about whatsoever. It’s called that because of the similar effect it has, a tendency to spread and infect people….in a good way!

Viral marketing is a marketing technique used to build public awareness of one’s product or company and is a perfect way to trigger a domino effect in your online business.

Oxford dictionary defines domino effect as a situation in which one event causes a series of similar events to happen on after the other.

To paint the picture,let me give you one weird example and from an even bizarre source.

I came across this in the washrooms (I told you it was a weird example )when I was in campus and some naughty guy had written on the wall…

People who write on walls are jerks

…and what do you think followed?

This guy forgot that just by expressing his feeling about people who write on the walls, he became one of them. The next person to visit the washrooms with a pen in hand responded…

Just like you

And the next? And you too . It went on and on and I guess it still does and will continue for as long as the the next person to respond remains relevant and the painter doesn’t show his head there with a can.

That was a weird example of a viral effect but let’s now go back to viral marketing in the context of your online business.

Viral marketing basically refers to letting people spread the word about your online business to others when they come into contact with each other, who then let others know and so on and so on…

You can use many forms of media (videos, websites, pictures, games, emails, free stuff) to reach out to the public with the help of the user.

In a nutshell, you ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family, and they will do the same, resulting in it spreading like a virus.

The motives can be as simple as just being nice by forwarding a nice email or there could be some monetary incentive like you’d find with an affiliate program.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost and the results can be extraordinarily high.

For business owners, using Viral marketing techniques is a good choice to get their product out there quickly.There needs to be effort at first to get the ball rolling, but once it starts, it gets bigger and hard to stop.

Here are a few ways being used to implement viral marketing by online business owners.

Giveaway and resale rights: This as a viral marketing technique is hot right now. Basically, you create short informative reports or videos on a topic relevant to your online business and pass giveaway or resale rights to the users of such products.

If the products are worth their salt, they get passed along really fast as free bonuses to other products or as freebies on squeeze pages.

Rebranding rights: This works like the former but instead of giving people resale and giveaway rights, you give them the opportunity to brand the products with their affiliate links before passing the product along to their friends and family.

If the people they referred then purchases the products recommended in the products, you credit them with the sale and they earn affiliate commissions. You can also develop rebrandible softwares.

WordPress themes: If you are proficient with php, you can develop wordpress themes and give them away for free. You can then drop your url right at the bottom of the themes.

Personally, I discovered webdesignlessons.com blog from another site that used their free theme (I can’t exactly recall which site that was) and even though I later dropped their theme myself for another one that matched my preferences, I still visit the blog from time to time. So? The darn trick works. Period.

These are just some of the ways being used by internet business owners to create a buzz about their products or services. There are many more and I will share them with you on this blog in the next posts.

One last thought, have you ever come across an email or video that get sent from one person to the next, then the next and before you realize, it gets sent back to you for the second or even the third time?

Personally I have several of them in my inbox. I can send one of them to you if you like. (just kidding… but yeah, I can send one to you).

What if you had your URL or a graphic branded with your website URL in one of those viral videos and emails?

So, get creative and have viral marketing working for your online business.

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