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.

Stop with the enforced e-mail forwards already! Trying to force or bribe people to forward your info to a friends or family in order to be rewarded or win looks skanky in today’s ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell visitors nothing about their friend’s or family’s privacy in the space directly next to the e-mail form.

A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers are compelled to do so by the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points or something else.

What absolutely will not work:

Most businesses have an online presence these days.  It is foolish not to.  Business moves at a faster rate online.  People can access any number of products and compare them in a fraction of the time it would take going from store to store.  They can also read feedback from previous customers to see what they think.

These opinions will feed into the type of brand that you are trying to create with your products.  Overall, branding works from a number of levels.  First you have the name of the business and your logo.  It appears on all of the correspondence that you send out and products that you market for sale.

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”.

In order to be successful using forums to do viral marketing there are some things that are required. 

Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research.

1.    Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms.

2.    Choose popular forums.  There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.