What Are Viral Marketing Techniques?

The concept of viral marketing is one of the more recent methods of advertising to come to the Internet. As the word ‘viral’ suggests, it depends on people passing your advertising material around like a cold. It would usually go from friends and colleagues to their friends and colleagues ad infinitum. You can imagine that if I sent a message to all the people in my address book and they did the same, the message would probably reach a million people in a month. All free of charge.

Viral marketing is low cost and can be fast and far reaching, if you use the proper marketing medium, but it does tend to be nonspecific. That is to say, you do not know who is going to receive your viral ad, so you do not know if that individual will be interested or not.

You can draw certain conclusions, if you select your material properly though. Say, you had a website on craft work. You could send out a free knitting pattern to all your friends and to those other people who have given you permission to do so (no spamming, please). Put the URL of your website at the bottom and tell the recipients that they may pass it on to anyone they know who would appreciate it.

Job done!! Now you know that most of the recipients after the first wave that you sent out yourself will be interested in crafts and / or knitting. It is also pretty safe to presume that most of them will be older women with computers. If you marked your return URL with a code by sending them to a web page like viral-ad1-knitting.html and had a sign-up box their for a newsletter, you would soon have a list of older, computer literate women who like knitting or and other crafts. That information would be of use.

Various companies send out different things. It could be a free report on smoking or catching trout or bicycle maintenance. Some people simply send out jokes. Sending out jokes or pictures is not focused but you can see how other things are very focused.

Hotmail developed this strategy and they maintain that they went from zero subscribers to twelve million in eighteen months. That is some record to beat. Look at the bottom of a lot of the email circulars that you get and you will probably still see Hotmail’s viral marketing.

This is the best viral marketing technique, but you must attach you URL to something of value, you friends will not want to send junk or sales blurb to their friends and family. Keep the emails informative, helpful or humorous, is the best tactic.

Very similar to this technique is the use of a sigfile (short for ‘signature file’). Write a catchy little one or two line file with your URL at the end. Outlook, Outlook Express and most of the others will append this sigfile to the bottom of your emails automatically. This is a good method of getting your URL out to thousands of people a month, particularly if, when you write to say, your Mum, she forwards it to all your brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles.

It is a straightforward, yet free viral marketing strategy that many people overlook. By the way, use the same sigfile in the entries you make on blogs. You do not make any? Shame on you, you should. Search Google for related blogs like – blogs knitting – and sign up to a few. Then read the posts and submit comments with your sigfile. Hundreds will read them and some will click through, if you are not too boring. Do not bore people on blogs by advertising yourself.

Owen Jones, writes on a few topics, but is now involved with Marketing Your Website. If you want to know more, go to our website at The Best Sales And Marketing Strategy. This article, What Are Viral Marketing Techniques? is released under a creative commons attribution licence.