If “online viral marketing” sounds like just another internet cliché to you, think again. Online viral marketing is the hottest new marketing strategy that is generating tons of cheap publicity and targeted traffic for e-commerce ventures of all sizes and industries. Online viral marketing involves taking the age old concept of word-of-mouth publicity, and revolutionizing it to suit the modern social networking and web 2.0 era.

The beauty of online viral marketing is that each customer becomes a marketer for your business which greatly reduces advertising and marketing expenses. A well executed online viral marketing campaign is widely recognized today as one of the most effective and cheap methods of web promotion.

Hotmail.com was one of the pioneers of online viral marketing techniques. Hotmail.com's use of a simple and cost-effective online viral marketing strategy to virtually monopolize the email service market is part of an internet legend. Admittedly, Hotmail.com had a great service to sell – the first online web-based free email service. But their success is due as much to their online viral marketing strategies, as to the quality and uniqueness of their service.

If you own a website or an e-business, you should seriously consider online viral marketing as a promotional tool. Online viral marketing costs merely a fraction of conventional advertising channels, but is equally effective, if not more. Read on for a few common online viral marketing strategies to get you started.

The fundamental principle of online viral marketing is that you should make it easy for visitors to share information and their opinion about your website. To this end, links and buttons are your best friends. Visitors might be eager to tell their friends about your website, but the reality is, people on the internet have very low attention spans. For visitors to tell their friends about your website, you need to make it as easy as clicking a button or link. Make sure to add a prominent “tell your friends about us” link to your website. It is a simple but very effective way to generate traffic.

Another online viral marketing rule is that you should always make sure that your promotional links and buttons are easy to find and use. There is an old three-click rule that webmasters talk about. The rule states that if a visitor is unable to find what he is looking for in three clicks, the visitor is gone forever. Keep this in mind while placing your promotional material on the website.

Online viral marketing is all about realizing the harsh reality of the internet - that the competition is cut-throat. You probably have only one shot, and a brief one at that, to arrest the visitor's attention. So if your content is obscure, difficult to understand or pointless, visitors will not have the patience to wade through it and you have lost potential customers.

A referral tool is a great way to get a lot of referrals, but if referring your site to their friends also carried a reward or incentive for the visitor, he is even more likely to click the button and tell his friends about it. A reward scheme with a reward that is particularly appealing to your target audience is a great online viral marketing technique, which IBM consultant and online viral marketing expert David Weltman calls “referrals on rocket fuel”.

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