Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It is, also, a powerful way to generate traffic to your website.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

An E-book that includes your marketing message and a link to your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your message by willing participants.

This is the basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get established. When the two founders set up their free email system, all the messages that were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their friends advertised the free email site.

It is a well known and widely accepted fact, that E-books….FREE E-books…are one of the best weapons in a viral marketing campaign arsenal.  Here are four good reasons why this is true today and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future:

1.    E-books are cheap to produce and don’t take long to set up. If you have articles that you have already written about the subject you are promoting, you can simply combine these articles into an E-book.  If, on the other hand, writing isn’t your forte, you can use rebrandable E-books that have been produced by others.  Just use your favorite search engine and do a web search for “rebrandable E-books”.

Those of us who regularly shop on line are familiar with the array of free gifts, free bonuses and just plain freebies that are offered to a visitor to a website to encourage them to buy. How could you collect, select and offer free gifts, which will be valued as much as the original merchandise that is being purchased, put these gifts together and add them to your E-book? There are just three steps to do that very thing. They are:

If you’ve been publishing on the Internet for any time, you know that the true power of eBooks comes from making the eBook re-brandable.  That means, you let your readers change all or parts of the affiliate-links in it thus giving them a great incentive to further distribute your eBooks. Before this smart little tool, you could only do this if you converted your eBooks into Windows-only *.exe files.

Why give away a free report?

As an affiliate marketer the more you can give your prospects in terms of quality and information, the more you’ll stay on their minds.  Giving a way a free report is a good way to build your mailing list as well as give something of value to your customers.  You’re also establishing yourself as an expert in your chosen field, which will build trust and credibility with your customers.