As the number of internet businesses grow and offline businesses turn to online methods, your business must implement every possible method of marketing vailable.



You may think that just because your product, service or website is the best, unless people know it exists and can find it, then your business is dead in the water or at best it's going to be bobbing around and getting washed about with the ever changing tide.

Although there are a great number of methods used by business websites when it comes to marketing, there still remains some very simple to impliment methods that anyone can use which also produce the greatest results.

One of these is called Viral Marketing.

Mention the word virus to most people and they think "illness, desease, cold/flu bug" etc. Some people will think "email virus", you know the ones, they infect just one computer but because of how email works, this one infection can then infect 100 more computers which then infects another 100. Before you know it, that one single infection has now spread to over 100,000 computers.

Now imagne that instead of a dreaded email virus being spread, it was your marketing message.

While there are many forms of viral marketing, perhaps one of the most used or easy to implment is "email viral marketing".

But how are you going to get someone to pass on your marketing message via email?

There are actually many forms available to you for this. Think of how many funny emails you have received in the past month. They made you smile and they made you laugh. There is a very high chance that you wanted to share that email with some of your friends by email as it costs you nothing to send.

With a few mouse clicks you've just sent that email to 10 or 20 of your friends but did you notice at the bottom of that email there was a small one line message and a website URL?

This is how the company or person that originally wrote the content of the email will benefit. Everytime that email is opened, the reader will see that simple innocent one-liner and URL and may even click on it. This method is responsible for huge amounts of traffic to that persons website.

Sometimes the goal isn't about getting visitors to a website. Larger businesses and corperations will simply use viral marketing as a method of brand advertising.

One of the reasons that Viral marketinf by the use of email has become so popular is due to the zero cost involved and the other reason is that it isn't seen as spam as it is someone you know that is sending you the email. You are more likely to open an email from someone you know than if it had been sent to you from an unknown person or company.

Create gossip, or a funny story, a joke or maybe an addictive flash game that can be played online at your website. Start sending a few emails to people that you know. You don't have to send it to 1000's of people for it to spread. If there is an interest in the content of the email then people will spread it for you.

Maybe one of the classic examples of a large company using viral marketing is Microsoft with their Hotmail email service. I think that example alone shows the sheer power and effectivensess of viral marketing.

And now it's your turn to act upon the power of viral marketing. It's free, easy and can be used over and over again. If you're not using it then you are losing a massive amount of free web traffic that's just floating around out there right now which could be yours.