So what is Viral Marketing? It’s really just a method to get your message out to as many people as possible by word of mouth. In other words the idea is to spread your message much like a computer virus would spread.

“Infection” in this case though is a good thing; in this context it’s people becoming aware of you and your website.

Now the actual message can be in many formats, from an email, a video, an audio file, and more. The idea is to get people who already have your message to spread it to people they know, multiplying your message spreading exponentially.

Firstly, I must make it crystal clear that I am not talkng about spamming millions of people. Apart from the legalities of doing this, sending spam is just nuts, no one ever wants it, and is certainly not going to spread is it, after all if it makes it past the spam folders and actually makes it into an Inbox, it’s going to get deleted when it is read isn’t it (that’s if it even gets read).

Here we go with what seems the topical phrase of all my articles, “Relevant Great Content”. Yes nothing has changed, you need to give value to people who have received your message so that a) they may want to take action with it, and b) forward it on to other people.

So how do you get people to do this? How do we get people to actually pass on your message to someone else?

First things first, it has to be something relevant and useful. In other words it has to have value (real or perceived). The person who has received your message has to believe it will give value to someone else (and/or them!) before they will pass it on.

One thing I have found in this industry is the power of partnerships; it’s a lot easier to get you message out there if you have friends in the industry with large mailing lists of their own.

Let’s say you have released a new e-Book. You currently have a mailing list of 1000 people who have expressed an interest or actually purchased something from you in the past.

Your e-Book is, of course in a related niche so you feel sure you can generate some interest in your mailing list so that is the first place to attack.

Now you do have an affiliate program in place don’t you? Read up on the details of why you need an affiliate program in the affiliate article, as this is a vital step because decent affiliates will market your product to their mailing lists and contacts, and this is the power of viral marketing!

When starting to look more at website promotion; it pays to do a little research first as a smart way to move forward fast!

Let’s imagine you have 100 affiliates and each one of them has 1000 customers on their mailing lists. Suddenly you have leveraged on your affiliate and your message is broadcast to 100,000 people in addition to your 1000 people in your mailing list.

Taking it to the next level imagine if your affiliates have affiliates of there own, see how the numbers can grow exponentially?

Now this example is about affiliates, but there is also no reason with the right message that you can’t get your customers doing the work of the affiliates by forwarding your message on to their friends.

In these cases the primary motive is not making money, but it may be because they think your product is great and a friend would benefit from it, or they just think it’s cool and want to tell the world.

Ahhh the power of word of mouth advertising, I tell you there is no more powerful force in advertising then getting your customers telling their friends how cool, hip and fantastic you and your products are (I’m sure you’ve told all your friends about me, haven’t you?).

If you can get customers telling your friends about your product and then once they sign up they tell their friends well you can see that it will take no time at all to have a huge response to your message!

You’ll be needing to buy new servers for your website because the old one has melted with the overwhelming traffic you have received (did you like how I got a reference to my website in between the valuable content?).

Ok Tim, I hear you saying I get the message that this Viral stuff may be handy, but how can I actually use this stuff on my site.

Well firstly, a great technique I used is included in with the master Mike Filsaimes Butterfly Marketing product this has Viral Software included for people who can easily pass on information about your site to other people. They actually automatically get a box to enter friends email addresses, etc.

Pretty well no other method will get you more traffic than Viral traffic because let’s face it, Viral traffic is effectively word of mouth advertising (assuming you have set it up properly). Some of the coolest sites on the Internet exist and grow in member sizes every day due to these techniques.