Viral marketing refers to the marketing method of using your existing website visitors or other website owners to send you new referrals, visitors, and subscribers.  This is a very effective strategy and can be used in many different ways.

An easy way to get started with viral marketing is through article marketing.  You simply submit articles that you have written to article reprint directories.  These are sites that other website owners and bloggers visit in order to find free content for their web pages.

When you submit an article to a directory, you are allowing other people the option of publishing your article on their web page.  In exchange, they will include a link back to a site you have specified.  To get the best results, write articles that have something to do with the content found on your site, and make sure the link you include is a link that has the same type of information as the article, rather than simply sending the traffic to your home page.

Creating an ebook is another way to use viral marketing. You can sell the ebook and include resell rights or you may give the ebook and allow others to give the ebook away as well.  You will want to stipulate that while persons may resell the ebook or give it away for free, they do not have the right to change the information.




This is important.  If you create a title page that includes your URL (or if you add your URL to other places within the ebook), you will want to make sure that the persons who resell the ebook know that they cannot take your info out of the ebook and replace it with theirs. 

A similar idea is to create a special report (sometimes referred to as a “viral report”).  A special report is anything longer than an article but shorter than an ebook.  They are very popular as they do not take much time to create.  And many people enjoy reading them as they can get a crash course on a subject in a short amount of time.  Again, you can choose to sell them with resell rights or simply give them away.

If you choose, you can create brandable ebooks and reports.  This means that some of the links inside the content can be changed to reflect a person’s individual affiliate link.

For instance, we’ll say that you created an information product on gardening. To gain publicity, you created a special report that contains some basic information and explains that if the readers want to learn more, they can purchase your information product.  Your affiliate can include their specific affiliate link and when one of the people they distribute the report to becomes a customer, you and the affiliate will both be paid.  Viral marketing is a great way to increase your traffic and your sales.