A viral product is an e-book or report that you give away to your subscribers as well as to distribution sites. Included in your e-book/report is your web site url and, if you choose, an embedded subscription box that allows readers to join your list directly from said viral product.
What makes Viral Products Effective?
The reason these are so effective is because the distribution model allows your URL to spread across the web in ways youwill love, and without much work or expense to you.
Most other web site owners are hungry for content. When they don't want to do the work of creating a report themselves, they simply go out and find a free, pre-written one and give it to their visitors. If your e-book is good enough, you'll soon have hundreds of sites offering your work to their visitors. You get the benefit of their traffic for zero bucks.
Where Can I Distribute My E-Book?
Search for as many appropriate distribution sites as possible.
Use some really clever ways to distribute your report. Go outside the usual outlets and submit your work to popular general purpose web sites like ucows.com and Download.com.
Another tactic which could be highly effective, but somewhat risky, is to submit your e-book into the public domain.
You would have to be willing to give up your copyright and risk someone else rebranding your book as their own. If you're up to the challenge, take a look at Project Gutenberg and Digital Book Index.
Maintaining The Flow
If something seems to be working well, do it again. releasing just one viral product will bring you traffic. Releasing dozens of viral products will give you a nice, long term flow of new visitors.
Viral products can be short or long term traffic generators depending on how you manipulate them. Try and stick to a schedule of pumping out at least one free, viral report a month, you'll have a superb no-cost traffic tool in your arsenal to bring in a non-stop flow of new traffic.
Closely related to to viral product promotion in the sense that your links will spread across multiple channels. Your job is to write high quality articles that other marketers want to use to beef up their content.
You remain the copyright holder when you submit an article.
You are just granting permission for reprints. Each article you submit should have what's known as a byline or resource box. This is just a brief piece of text at the end of your article where you write a short "about the author" description of you and/or your web site and include your web site url.
You'll definitely get exposure through reprints when other marketers use your article for web site or e-zine content. You'll also gain leverage in the search engines. The more articles you submit on the same theme, the more often your articles will come up as top listings for related keywords.
This is a bonus that many people overlook. Try to compose your articles with keyword optimization in mind and see what happens.
Here's a quick reference list of sites to submit your articles to:
Warren Peters has sinced written about articles on various topics from Environment, Anger Control and Horse Racing. Warren Peters is the publisher of Free And Cheap Traffic Blog. It is a conglomeration of marketing tips and tactics.. Warren Peters's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.