Viral Marketing Strategies - Learn How to Spread the Word for Free!

When I started working online, I thought I will be totally away from what I have studied academically but I was wrong. One of the first things I learnt and heard about it in online marketing was viral marketing and its rule in advertising and specially online advertising.

My virology background helped me to understand the meaning of viral marketing easier and faster and use it to promote my online business better than most of my competitors.

It is called viral marketing because it spreads the word like the way that viruses become replicated in our body. When a virus succeeds to enter to our body, it tries to find the proper cell, attach to it and insert its genetic material to the cell. The genetic material starts making tens or even thousands of new viruses inside the cell and then the new-born viruses rip the cell membrane and each of them repeats this cycle inside another cell.
So after few hours, one virus becomes replicated to millions of viruses.

Virus Replication in the cell:
Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

Can the same replication method to be used in the internet marketing? Yes it can. Viral marketing is based on the same method. There are many different viral marketing strategies.

Hotmail is the best example of viral marketing. Hotmail was used to have a small text ad at the bottom of all the emails that its users sent. So any email that was sent through Hotmail, was an advertising for it. More than 150,000 new users joined Hotmail for several years through this simple free advertising. This huge number of users that Microsoft generated through this viral marketing strategy, is the main effective factor for the current MSN traffic (MSN is the second high traffic website after Yahoo).

So viral marketing works. The small text ad at the bottom of each email that was sent through Hotmail, was like a virus that is able to become replicated to thousands of viruses and infect other cells. How?

You receive an email from me as a Hotmail user. You see the Hotmail text ad at the bottom of the email. The ad invites you to sign up for a Hotmail email account. You click on it and you will see that Hotmail has something more than your current email service that you use. For example it has free email client service (Outlook) that you have to pay for it in other services. So you sign up and become the new user of Hotmail. You start sending emails through Hotmail and so you spread the text ad at the bottom of your emails. Others join Hotmail through you email and … .

This is how viral marketing works.

How can you use viral marketing strategies in your online business?

There are many different viral marketing methods and you can work on all of them. The good news is that they are all free and you just need to learn and spend some time to impalement them for your online business.

1- Viral emails:

You send or reply several emails everyday. Most of the email services let you have your signature in your outgoing emails. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express to send emails, you should take the advantage of having your signature at the bottom of emails. Just go to Tools > Options… > Signatures and activate a signature in for your outgoing emails.

You can enter a text as the signature but what I suggest is saving your signature in a html file and then loading the file in each of the emails you compose or reply.

But what should you have in your signature?

Best regards,
Vahid Chaychi
Please visit my weblog: www.WebOma.com

This was an example of a very simple signature you can have in your emails. If you have a website, its URL and a humble request for visiting it can drive several free visitors to your website everyday.

If you have a free e-book, you should have the download link in your signature:

Best regards,
Frank Smith
Click here to download my $65 value e-book for FREE:
http://… … … … …

You can make a good and professional signature for your emails. This will be a big help in long term. You can even ask the receivers to forward the signature to their friends.

2- Recommend us:

You have seen the “recommend us” link in many websites. When you click on the “recommend us” link, a form will be appeared that you can enter your friends email address and a brief message and when you submit the form, your friends will receive the URL of the website that you recommended to them.

You should have such a tool on your website. It should have it too because I have not installed it yet. It is very easy. There are many “recommend us scripts” that you can download for free.

When users recommend your website to their friends, new visitors will come to your website and will recommend it to their friends. This makes you remember something, right? Yes, you remembered the Hotmail viral marketing method.

“Email this article” is another good idea if you have a weblog, article directory or you have an article directory section on your website. When users read and enjoy an article, they like to send its link to their friends and they will come to your website.

When you can drive free traffic to your website by using such easy tools, why shouldn’t you do that?

3- Article marketing:

Write articles and post your resource box with your website link and your email address to the bottom of each article. Then submit them to the article directories. People will find and read your articles and will come to your website. Webmasters and bloggers will post your articles on their websites and drive traffic to it. Your article will go from a website to another one and act like viruses. Yes, this is called viral marketing.

Don’t forget to have your copyright at the bottom of the articles. You should explain that others are allowed to post your articles on their websites as long as they don’t touch the resource box.

4- Forums marketing:

Forums or discussion boards are websites that users discuss about special subjects on them. They are free to join and you will be allowed to post your own threads or reply to others threads upon your registration. Forums are the best places to spread the words and let others know you, your activities and websites.

You should read the forums rules before your post. Each of them have different rules. Most of them let you have your signature at the bottom of your posts and you can have your website URL in your signature. Forum marketing can be kind of viral marketing when you keep on it for a long time. Your posts and threads will become popular and people will refer each other to them.

You need to find suitable forums related to your website.

6- E-book Marketing:

A free e-book can work like a real virus for your website. Create a free to download e-book about your website, products and services. Submit your e-book to e-book directories and have the download link in your websites, articles, email signatures, forum posts and wherever you can.

After a while your e-book becomes distributed among internet users like the flu virus. You should have links to your website in your e-book. The e-book readers should be allowed to send the e-book to others for free. It is clear that the content of the e-book should seem attractive to readers. If so, they will help your e-book to be distributed otherwise they will close and delete it from their computer after reading the first page.

7- Viral software and scripts:

If you are a programmer, you can create useful and free to download softwares and scripts. Then you should use the same strategies you used to distribute your e-books, for distributing your softwares and scripts. There are several well-known and high traffic script directories that you can have your products listed on them. It will generate a lot of free traffic to your websites.

8- Affiliate program:

If you have a product or service, you should run your own affiliate program and let other webmasters to sell your products and services and earn commissions. This will drive a lot of traffic to your website and webmasters will recommend you to each other. Webmasters will see your products that are promoted on other websites and then they will join your affiliate program to make money through promoting your products.

Starting your affiliate program is not that hard. If you have an electronic product that is downloadable or an online service like web hosting, you can use services like ClickBank to run your affiliate program. If you have other kinds of products and services, you should buy an affiliate script which is not that expensive and then install it on your website. You can easily do it if you are an experienced webmaster but if you are not, you need to consult programmers.

9- Free online services:

You can offer free services on your website, specially services that can be used by other webmasters on their websites. Ask the users to link back to your website because of the free service they receive from you. Other webmasters will see your link on the websites and will click on it and use your service for their websites. After a while you will have a lot of one way backlinks.

Offline Viral Marketing:

Viral marketing can be done offline too. If I just mention the different kinds of offline viral marketing, you will realize that you already know all of them and you have a already used most of them for your business or other things. But you should work on offline viral marketing more because it is effective and can be complementary to the traffic that your website receives through the online viral marketing strategies.

Offline viral marketing strategies may not give any significant result at the first day but they will make you amazed if you keep on working on them for a while.

1- Word of mouth:

Looks familiar, right? You know how people become informed about news and gossips. They tell each other when they meet or talk on the phone.

You can tell your friends, neighbors, relatives, classmates and … about your website and your online business. Give them your website URL (you should have registered a domain name that can be memorized easily) and ask them to recommend others to visit your website.

After a while everybody around you and in your city will know your website and tries to visit it every now and then. When they come to your website, they will use the online viral marketing tools you have on you website to refer more visitors.

Have you ever seen that Google advertises on the radio, TV, sport stadiums and … ? No, you have never seen it because Google doesn’t advertise at all. According to Google founders, what that made Google well-known and made it the number one search engine was word of mouth. 75% of the traffic of the websites was through Google just in the first year it started working. It was all through word of mouth.

Google founders are true. They really don’t advertise. I personally have talked and will talk about Google with my friends and people I meet and make them to visit and use Google.

So do not underestimate the power of word of mouth.

2- Business cards, flyers, stickers, pens, calendars and …:

Order a few thousands of business cards and have your website URL printed on them. Give your business cards to everybody you meet. Leave a bunch of them on the counters of all the stores and offices you go and let others pick them up.

If you can not afford to order business cards, just write or print your name and website address on the small pieces of paper and use them as your business card.

If you can afford, order other things like flyers, stickers, pens, calendars and … and have your website URL printed on them.

These kinds of advertisements are not as viral as the “word of mouth” and also are not free but you can take them into consideration and use them when you can afford.

Bottom line:
Learn about viral marketing strategies as the free and effective advertising methods and use them to promote your websites and online business.