Viral Marketing

Viral marketing can be a very powerful and effective strategy to get more traffic to your site, and therefore more sales. Think of viral marketing as the online equivalent of the effect that word of mouth has on small businesses in the offline world. Most small businesses depend on their loyal customers recommending them to their friends, who tell their friends, and so on.

This is also true to some extent in the online world as well, except here you can actively encourage this process yourself by employing various marketing techniques to spread the word about your website. The first one I would like to mention is through articles. I have already discussed this in the articles section, but it should be reiterated that this is a very powerful marketing strategy. An article that you submit today will not only be picked up by websites in the coming weeks or months, but will continue to be seen by potential visitors in years to come. Now think of the potential visitors you could get if you submit a few articles a week, all year round.

If you are selling a product at your site, and have an affiliate program to increase sales, then another great viral marketing strategy is to produce a free viral ebook on a subject closely related to your site. This viral ebook could be given away to every customer who buys your product, or webmasters in a similar field who have a large database of subscribers to email to, for example.

The free viral ebook should include links to your site, which can be freely altered to include the affiliate's own affiliate link. You benefit from extra sales, and your affiliates receive extra commissions by distributing the ebook containing their affiliate link to as many people as possible.

As you can see you don't necessarily need to spend lots of money on advertising to be successful online, as these extremely cheap and simple techniques can be just as effective. If you want to be more creative, and set yourself apart from other sites, you could embrace new technology and create MP3 interviews or podcasts that again can be passed on and on, spreading virally.