The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

The term viral marketing describes any strategy that a marketer uses to encourage someone to pass their marketing message to someone else, thus creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure to people. The viral marketing strategy uses the rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands of people.

Off line this is called "creating a buzz", "word-of-mouth", "network marketing.", "leveraging the media" But online it is known as viral marketing

There are many viral marketing strategies. Some work better than others of course. There are six basic elements you should think about including in your strategy. You do not have to include all of these elements in your viral marketing strategy but the more elements that you include; the more powerful you will find your results to be.

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources

The word "FREE" is one of the most powerful words that any marketer can use. Most marketing programs will give away things like eBooks, software, reports, information, graphics and any other thing that they think will get someone attention. You could use the words "inexpensive" or "cheap" which may get some interest, but the word "Free" will get traffic a lot faster.

Why would viral marketers give stuff away for free? The reason is that the know that they may not make money today but sometime in the future they might make money from the person that they gave the free item to. The word "FREE" attracts people who then see other things that you are selling. Will add their name to your list; Buy something for your website and any other opportunity that you put to them where you will earn money.

If you want your message to spread like a virus the way that it is carried must make it easy to spread and replicate. Software downloads, websites, e-mail, graphics are all easy mediums to achieve this.

The reason that viral marketing is so good on the internet is because of the instant compunction that is so easy and inexpensive on the net.

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If you want your message to spread viral the means that you choose to it get out must be able to be rapidly scaled form very small to very large. An example of this is you are using an auto responder to send out messages once you have collected someone's email.

This might be fine when only sending out a few messages but will it handle the amount of messages if your campaign really goes well.

There are certain things that motivate people that viral marketer's target. These are emotions such as greed, the need to beloved, popular and understood. Designing your message around one of these motivations or desires and you should have a winner.

How many people do you communicate with each day? Most people will have a close network of family and friend of 8 to 12 people. They will also have a much bigger network of people that they deal with each day. Offline Marketers have used the power of people's network for many years.

People also have networks on the internet. They collect emails; friend people on sites like face book and twitter. Internet marketers also collect emails in opt in email lists and marketing on social sites. If you place your message into a network it should spread across most of the network.

There are many ways that viral marketing plans can use to get their message across. You just have to be creative in your marketing plan. An example would be an author that gives away free articles, so that they can get a text link on someone's website.

A news release can be picked up by hundreds of websites. This means someone else is using their resources to show your marketing message rather than your own recourses.