Viral marketing is about getting others to spread your message for you. It works on the same principal as pyramid spelling! For example, you tell two people about your offer, and those two people each tell another two people and so it goes on. You only spoke to two people, but within a very short space of time hundreds of people know about your offer!

We'd all like a marketing system that worked in that way wouldn't we?

Usually for a piece of content or a product to go viral, one of two things needs to happen:

Your content or product needs to be so unique or funny that people see it and automatically feel the urge to tell their friends or list about it

Or

You need to provide an "incentive" for your visitors to tell others about it!

In the first scenario, where no incentive is required, you can expect the viral process to happen rapidly, in some cases thousands of visitors can be generated in hours.

In the second scenario, the manufactured traffic won't come as fast, but never the less, it will come, and keep coming for a long time. Even with scenario two, your content needs to be good, and in particular your incentive that promotes the viral behaviour needs to be of real value!

Setting up an affiliate scheme for your product and then offering high commissions to the top players in your niche is one form of viral incentive. Another is to give away rebrandable ebooks and software. Another is to use a tell-a-friend script with the offer of a reward for people who "tell their friends".

Now for the secret tactic that I promised you in the title, it's a tactic I use and it works!

What about offering your visitor a free gift in return for a link on a page of their site? Sounds ok, but not that viral?

Well think about it for a moment. You get backlinks, and the backlinks improve your rankings. Improved rankings bring you more traffic. The additional traffic generates more backlinks, which lead to even better rankings and even more traffic!

Now do you see the viral potential? This is a little used viral tactic that can bring big results.

I've presented the viral tactic above in it's simplest form. Even in this form it can be highly effective, but with a simple "tweak" it can bring an avalanche of traffic quickly in addition to the traffic that comes from the improved rankings. All you need is to think big, and think viral.