This medium could be used to spread the word about your business among the target audience. The essence of it is that you empower visitors to your website to tell other people about your company and your site. You provide something that encourages people to spread the word, and momentum builds. What’s great about viral marketing is that it is low effort and low expense.

Viral marketing is more powerful than third-party advertising and you can expect a good conversion rate because it conveys an implied endorsement from a friend. People who visit your website as a result of viral marketing will have good impression about your company or the product because someone has recommended it to them.

Forms of Viral marketing?

We can identify two most common forms of viral marketing as service and incentive based models.

Service Based

In the service based model consumer has to spread the information about the company or the product to his / her friends in order to get the service.

Netscape Instant messaging is an excellent example of a service-based model. Also some search engines and directories use this model to list websites. Some companies use this model to provide access white papers.

Incentive Based

Incentive-based models provide consumers cash, credit, or other rewards for spreading company information to friends. This model is encouraging people to spread the message actively because of the incentives. Incentive based viral marketing campaigns will cost more than the service-based campaigns.

Viral Marketing methods and techniques?

Viral Marketing works best in combination with e-Mail marketing, since e-Mail marketing provides Viral Marketing with a great communication medium. You can use e-mail to spread the message. This could be done by sending e-mail messages to individuals or by joining e-mail discussion groups. Most of the service based viral marketing campaigns are using e-mail as the main technique.

Another medium to carry out your viral marketing campaign is through message boards and discussion forums. It is important to identify message boards and discussion forums relevant to your industry, product or service. By participating in these message boards and discussion forums you can create awareness of your company among the target audience. Writing articles is one of the powerful ways to spread your message. All you need to do is allow people to republish it for free, as long as they include a paragraph at the end of the article containing details of your company. This method is widely used by companies providing professional services like search engine marketing and web advertising. Freebies, Giving something away for free is another powerful marketing method available. Giving away a free something like e-book, mouse pad will encourage people to spread your message.

To be successful online you must Know The Fundamentals To Success. The marketers who are the most successful online are also the best students, they constantly study, read, listen, and watch. They go to conferences, they mastermind with other marketers, they then test and put into practice what they’ve learned.
Remember that marketing is more important than what your product is. If you have the greatest product ever and no one knows about it you won’t make any money. Direct response marketing online is very similar to direct response marketing offline. 90% of your time should be invested in marketing because nothing else will make you money. Don’t waste time figuring out how to do it right. Study the people who have already spent time and money on learning what does and doesn’t work. Then you can spend more of your time on collecting cash.
Your product needs to be valuable to your customers. They need to believe that what they receive is worth a lot more than what they paid for it. That will make them a life-long customer. Sell them something worthless and they will be unhappy and they will be gone forever. Sell products you believe in or don’t sell anything.
Test the waters to ensure that there is a legitimate demand for your product and/or service. Do this by simply talking to friends and family and ask them if they would find your offerings useful. Also, make up a short questionnaire and have people fill them out. On the questionnaire include questions pertaining to the problem that you are solving with your products/services. This will give you insight into the number of people that are experiencing this problem as well.
Create an optimized page for each of your targeted keywords by having ample page copy, focusing on keyword prominence, and using related page names, proper meta-tags, proper title tags, proper alt-tags, heading tags, and text links. Avoid dynamic database-driven content, JavaScript, keyword spamming, and multiple use of content.
Make sure there are lots of web sites linking to yours. So before you embark on your e-business journey be sure to develop a marketing plan. This plan must be flexible as it will change as your business grows, but it is critical to the success of your business to identify how you will position your products/services to your target market; and remember ? optimize your website BEFORE submitting it to the search engines.
Never stop learning. The best and richest marketers in the business spend the most amount of money buying books, tapes and courses that keep them on the cutting edge. Why? Because no one knows it all and new and better ways to market are discovered every day. There is a lot of valuable FREE information available online that is easy to find and can make you a lot of money. One good idea can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars in future sales for you. So invest in yourself and your future.