If you maintain this kind of business already, you would already appreciate that viral marketing is a prodigious way to get the word out about your product or service. When this happens, you can anticipate a tremendous surge in sales. But what about subscriptions to your newsletter? Can they too be affected by this type of marketing?

Of course, they can.

It will all depend on how difficult and successful you wish to make it. Not that these two factors automatically go hand in hand.

The most basic pattern of using viral marketing is probably a tell-a-friend script.

You have seen them and you probably used them as well, either knowingly or unknowingly.

All you have to do is type in someone's email address into a form, and the website will generally have text pre-inserted into the form telling the individual how tremendous you think the website is.

You also have an alternative. You could always add your own text instead.

Your friend receives an email which to them looks like you are revealing them about this fantastic new website and hopefully he will sign up to the newsletter to find out more.

This can be manipulated in other ways.

For instance what if you did a questionnaire. To get the results of the questionnaire, not only does the individual have to sign up to your newsletter, but they have to fill out a tell-a-friend script for three friends, telling them about this questionnaire.

Then when those three friends sign up and take the questionnaire, they will then see that they have to sign up to the newsletter to find out the results. As always, they need to tell three additional friends each.

In case you have not noticed, this has a colossal snowball effect and should see you exponentially growing your opt-in mailing list in no time at all.

This is not too hard to produce either. You could always ask several expert programmers how much he would charge for such a thing.

However, you have to remember that you must begin your marketing efforts with some fuel, and that fuel is people.

You have to get going with at least a few persons filling out the questionnaires for this to even begin. A elementary mathematical equation: 0 people telling 3 friends each still equals 0.

Additional way to develop your mailing list is to pay people for every subscriber they send your way.

This is not exactly the type of marketing many are teaching about but it will increase your opt-in list quite well if you pay enough and find enough peopleto do it.

For example, 10 cents per subscriber is fair enough. If people would gather in bulks, then that tiny amount would multiply and accumulate to higher percentage.

If people start sending you additional subscribers than you can manage to pay, then you can always put it on hold for a while.

But remember that if you manage your subscribers well, then you have a life time value of them. The return you will be getting from lifetime loyal customers are worth far more than the 10 cents you have shed in the initial start.

Hotmail.com used this structure of marketing in a small way that produced big results. At the bottom of each of the emails sent, they included a small line that said something like "Get your free email account with hotmail.com".

This meant that every time an email was sent from hotmail the recipient would read this and perhaps examine the offer of a free account and think that this is worth checking out. This resulted in Hotmail's huge growth in a relatively short space of time. But then Microsoft eventually brought Hotmail.com for an obscene amount of cash.

The example above is what happens to viral marketing when the lists are made effective. With the right style and the proper viral marketing applied, you too can grow that list and achieve the high profits many have already attained.