One way links send a strong message to search engines that your website is valuable and interesting enough for other sites to want to recommend it and promote it. Besides sending your rankings shooting upwards, they also send a lot of traffic to your site.

Viral marketing, a of word-of-mouth advertising that propagates itself in the same way as a virus, is one of the most effective ways to get one way links. A successful viral marketing campaign will multiply rapidly and spread like wildfire, increasing your site's visibility and sending a stampede of targeted traffic to your website.

Below are three tips to help you unleash a wildly successful viral marketing campaign.

Write and submit articles

Writing articles and submitting them to online article directories is one of the easiest and most effective ways of obtaining free publicity and acquiring links to your site without the need for reciprocal links.

All you do is write interesting articles on related topics and submit them to major article directories with a link back to your site. The amount of traffic generated is simply astounding. What's more, your articles also serve as a very powerful pre-selling technique, driving only targeted traffic to your website.

Do you have an ebook? Why not give it away? Users have read your article and they've come to your web site because they liked what they read and are interested in what you have to offer. An added bonus is when webmasters with mailing lists publish your articles on their sites.

Identify and market directly to your target audience

If you maintain a niche business, you need to determine your target audience. If it's something to do with children and parenting, your target audience will be parents. Once you've pinned that down, custom-design your marketing campaign to capture their interest. You could join a related blog and launch a word-of-mouth campaign promoting your niche.

Once other members participate in your new product launch with reviews and other discussions, your exposure is automatically guaranteed. Create a target e-mail list and keep interest alive with regular free offers or interesting links.

Digg your articles

Here's your chance to make it to the front page and be seen by millions of users. Unleash your creativity - write an article that sizzles; put a unique spin on an existing article; make a video that nobody can resist. Then submit it to Digg where everybody can see it and 'Digg' it.

If your submission rocks and earns enough positive Diggs, it goes on to the front page. There's more. Digg encourages conversations around the content, which has the potential of making your article the 'next big thing' with an ever-increasing deluge of one-way links to your website.

By using these viral marketing techniques, you can get the targeted traffic you need and grow your backlinks at the same time. The only cost is your time and creativity.