Simon Paul Thurston

Creativity.

This is one virtue that a site must possess if it intends to lead the race in the ruthless competition of Internet based businesses. With so much competition and rivalry, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a beautifully designed website - if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter.  You are not going to make it big.  Even worse,  you business could simply fade away from lack of potential customers and sales.

While there are a number of useful methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some that can help give you a competitive boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spyware.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing, also known as Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product, by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, or amusing story - which one person may pass on to another person with the company brand or logo or the product description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing, simply because it is extremely low cost.  In order to avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it, and in fact they are more likely to open it and read it.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they need help spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing receives from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed to each person.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you receive a great deal of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company.  You will be able to generate a significant flow of traffic of potential customers.  With a little ingenuity and imagination, as well as some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a large number of people and announce your existence to the world.

Almost every site and company is catching on to the effectiveness of Viral Marketing and Advertising.  Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization, viral marketing could easily push you far ahead in the website rating game.

Viral Marketing could be considered a somewhat sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You ”tempt” people into to passing your advertisement along.  This approach is very low cost (mostly free), which means not investing in it can be business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, or a funny story.  Create a gossip or a buzz - many movies are promoted by using scandals or gossip in order to make them more popular.  When we consider the movie “The Blair Witch Project” – we are presented with a perfect example of the effectiveness of viral marketing.

Most large companies have tried viral marketing and have had a great deal of success.  A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail.  They were the first large company to utilize the viral marketing scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

If you utilize viral marketing, it is certain to also work wonders for you.  You can reap the benefits Viral Marketing and boost your profits and sales tremendously.