Viral Marketing is more than this year's buzzword; it is currently the biggest and best form of marketing for a product out there. What's more it's 100% free.
You know how easy a virus spreads, right? Well viral marketing is exactly the same.
What is Viral Marketing? Well put simply Viral Marketing is word of mouth. I see something great; I tell you about it, you tell your mate John about it, John tells Sophie and so on. Of course it's not so much about the word on the street anymore; no nowadays we have a much better, faster method of spreading the good word - email.
You can't just go out, write an email about a great product and hope that everybody will spread it for you, because they won't. The trick is to send them something for free which is so great they can't possibly resist the temptation to hit the forward button in their email program and send it to all their contacts.
Remember that email you got last week with that funky game where you drove around your office in a chair race? It was so great you forwarded the mail around your own office and before long everybody was playing it instead of doing work? That's Viral Marketing in action right there baby. What you didn't realise is that when you visit the website you're actually visiting a subsection of a manufacturers website, and if you enjoy playing the game there is a high chance you may buy something from the site.
If you want to see some of these viral games in action visit my good friend Michael Hughes' website Galaxy Arcade. He's been making these games for a good few years now and has a number of top clients, plus the games are really cool too.
Offer interesting content that is searched by many people looking for help on specific areas.
Look at forums and discussion boards to see what type of questions are being asked. See if it is possible to find a hot topic and answer those questions whether it is in the form of an ebook or a website closely themed to give information on a specific subject.
Almost certainly there will be a lot of information already available on any niche chosen, so try to be different and offer something unique.
There are many places to visit to find out whether you chosen niche is popular. Visit sites like Ebay, take a look at the subheadings, look at what's hot and want it now sections to find what people are searching for.
Demos is another site that will give ideas of what's in demand, go to a general topic and then see how many results are given for subheading to see what is in demand.
Amazon can also offer an idea of what's selling, look at the bestseller lists, to find the latest hot topics.
Use a keyword tool to do some research regarding the number of searches per month on your chosen niche, to get an idea on how many people are looking for information on that subject.
Go to Google and do a search for your chosen niche and on the results page see how many Adwords ads appear on the right of the page. This will give an indication of how popular the topic is.
If there are many ads, then it is a popular niche, and there are many advertisers. This will mean that if thinking of using Adwords as part of the promotion process, then to achieve a good position will probably be expensive depending on the chosen niche.
If there are only a few results in the Adwords section, this doesn't mean that the niche won't be a success. Perhaps it is a new topic that has suddenly become popular and also it will be possible to get a good position in the Adwords results for a low cost per click.
Use search engines to see how many searches are being carried out to find popular niches.
Blogs are also a form of Viral Marketing. One day your blog seems to be perched on the precipice of obscurity, you write an interesting topic and the next day thousands of people are visiting your blog. Call it luck, call it chance, call it knowledge whatever it may be it just seems to happen.
There is some great info out there on viral marketing.
Viral Marketing Unleashed is an ebook which takes you through all the steps you need for a successful viral campaign. Click here for more info.
The Viral Ebook Brainstorm is an audio guide which explains how to setup an ebook with automated viral profit generators embedded within it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you're thinking about doing anything to make money on the internet you've got to check out the Rich Jerk's ebook, it really is an eye opener.