Viral marketing may be one of the most elusive, yet most potentially lucrative forms of online marketing. Many online marketers spin their wheels hopelessly in an effort to create a buzz around their products and services. While many attempts fail, many succeed and bring tremendous benefits.

There are many affiliates and internet marketers who neglect the sheer power of viral marketing because they think they won't see immediate results. But this is false thinking. Why promote your products all by yourself when you can share them with other resellers. Whether you get a new sale or a new subscriber a day, you can explode your traffic with viral marketing.

Basically, the program works like this:

1.Existing customer enters drawing for product/gift certificate on website
2.Customer is asked to “Tell-A-Friend” about the contest/drawing
3.For each friend who enters contest, the original customer receives 2 more entries
4.Friend of original customer passes the contest on to their friends, who tell their friends, and so on…

Viral marketing techniques

1. Word of Mouth - We have all seen this phenomenon displayed with many products . People spread the word about some great movie or gadget and suddenly everyone knows about it. Human nature dictates we tell our friends about some great product we have bought or found. Nature of the beast, it's just the way we are - so why not take full advantage of it?
If you have a web site - put up a simple 'tell a friend' form so your visitors can easily tell others about your great site. Easy and very simple to do but many webmasters don't do it. Similarly, if you have a newsletter, service, product or with any aspect of your site - just include a few sentences at the end of your copy - asking very politely, "if you found this service, product or web site helpful - why not tell your friends, family and colleagues about it."

2. Branding - Make sure you have a logo on your site or product. Branding your site is very important if you want your site or product to be noticed and talked about. For that matter, a catchy brand name can be a 'viral technique' in itself - so try and come up with one that springs from the lips with a distinctive ring to it! People recognize brands, it gives them a clear image of your site or product. Include your brand or logo on every page of your site and on every product, service, material coming from your site or business.

3. eBooks - Savvy marketers jumped on this new invention very quickly, they knew the 'viral' power of these little ebooks. Ebooks are electronic files that can be downloaded from any web site and distributed easily around the web. You can also have other webmasters or marketers, 're-brand' these ebooks with their own links. High quality ebooks get passed along very quickly and are great viral tools.
Anyone can write a simple ebook on the topic of their site. If you can't write, just get permission to use a collection of articles from the numerous 'article directories' on the web such as www.ezinearticles.com or www.goarticles.com . Ebook compiling software (in both .exe or pdf format) is relatively cheap or can be found for free on the net. Just Google to find it!

4. Viral Software - Some simple software products or applications can be very viral, often passed around or downloaded from the web by thousands each day. These have to be useful or handy products that the users will desire - ecalendars, organizers, personal planners, link checking software, and so on. Many are desktop products that sit on the computer user's desktop - prime location in the marketing arena.
And the best examples of this kind of viral software have the company logo, sales message and contact email - with LIVE LINKS to all of the above - conveniently displayed within the product. These simple software programs can be great viral promotional devices that spread like wildfire across the web. (get an example of this below in the author's resource box)

5. RSS - Newest player in the viral game! RSS which stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and just by the nature of what it does; RSS is an awesome viral tool. Originally used by news organizations to syndicate their news stories, it is usually associated with Blogs because blogs use an RSS feed to distribute their content. Good quality RSS feeds are picked up and displayed by different web sites all across the web.

A new concept for viral marketing by Tim Brocklehurst called Viral Spiral Marketing is taking the list building and viral marketing world by storm. We all know that JV’s or joint ventures are probably the most productive ways to expand your list and make a huge income. But you can use the benefits of a having a JV without having an actual product of your own. JV cross promotions are in essence websites promoting other websites. They do this mainly for commission sales or to earn favors. When marketing online nothing beats personal recommendations versus trying to promote your website and products all on your own.

Every good super affiliate knows that the site getting promoted will make more money than the JV partners promoting it. The site being promoted receives more list members, recognition and sales. Therefore it is nearly impossible to get JV partners to promote your site.

At A-1 Technology, we will not only allow your site to survive as a viable business on the Web, but you will also reap huge profits along the way. You can be assured of high quality services from us.