If you've been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, then you will probably have heard about viral marketing.

Viral marketing is a method that has helped a lot of people make their first real money online.

Basically viral marketing involves producing something very topical, funny, interesting or useful that can be given away for free.

You would give it away for free and the recipients would pass it on to their friends, who would pass it on to their friends and so on and so on.

One popular way of doing this is by producing a free report that helps people in some way. Ideally the free report will solve some sort of problem for the potential reader.

Most people involved in internet marketing will have heard the phrase "The money is in the list". But how do you go about building your own list of subscribers to your newsletter or e-zine?

Well one way is to give away valuable free content in the form of a free report. This encourages people to sign up for your newsletter, thus building you a list of subscribers that you can market products to in the future.

The difficulty for most people is that creating these free reports can be very laborious and time consuming. It would normally involve researching the subject thoroughly and then sitting down and actually compiling and writing the report.

You would then have to turn the report into a pdf format etc etc, all of which takes a great deal of time and effort.

But now all this has changed. You can now combine the power of viral marketing with killer content and have all the work done for you.

There are now services available on the internet where free reports are written by staff writers as well as other subscribers just like you. New reports are produced each month which you can give away in order to build your own list.

The clever part is that these reports can have affiliate links embedded in the content and because you can rebrand these reports, you can have your own affiliate links embedded before you give them away.

So as well as pleasing your subscribers with good quality content, you also have the chance to make some cash if they go ahead and buy a product from your affiliate link within the report!

It's a real 'win-win' situation.

In addition to all that, there is often the option for you to create your own reports that promote your own product or perhaps an affiliate product.

You can then submit your report so that other subscribers can give it away free. In which case you could quickly find that your report is distributed all over the internet, thus promoting your product or affiliate product and making you some serious extra income! Voila! You have your own viral marketing system working for you.

Viral marketing in this way is making a lot of people just like you a lot of money.

I have already downloaded some excellent free reports from services like this and rebranded them with my own affiliate links. The whole process is very easy and straightforward and i'll be giving away the reports to help me build my own list whist making money at the same time!

I have also written a report of my own and submitted it to one of these services. That was also very simple to do and it has already been downloaded by a good number of other subscribers, who will in turn be giving it away and so promoting my own product.

As I say, a very clever viral marketing idea. Wish i'd thought of it first!