What Everybody Ought To Know -- How To Use Viral Marketing To Promote Your Online Niche.

6 High-impact Viral Marketing Strategies YOU can use to save time and money!

By Dr Tony de Bree MBA from go4estrategy.com

One of the most effective and efficient new opportunities on the Net are the possibilities of viral marketing. In this short article you will learn:

1. What a virus is.
2. What viral marketing is.
3. What succesfull viral marketing strategies look like.
4. What 10 viral niche strategies YOU can use best.

You have to admire a virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration. This is what happens if also favourable conditions are met.The virus multiplies and duplicates himself endlessly.

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode under the right conditions. But fortunately in many cases the virus can also be stopped or killed.

If we want to use the same principles in our online niche, we will try to avoid that of course. But lets first see what viral marketing is.

2. The definition of viral marketing.

What does a virus have to do with marketing you might ask. Here is the definition of viral marketing we use:

“Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence".

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

The medium or the carrier can actually be anything digital like emails, eBooks, niche articles, software, websites including mini-sites or any other info- or knowledge products etc etc.

But in any case, it has to be something of value. Or else the virus will not spread.

Off the Internet, viral marketing is known as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing."

While others have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.

3. 6 high-impact viral marketing strategies.

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

a. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,

b. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,

c. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,

d. Who see the message,

e. Sign up for their own free e-mail service and then

f. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

By propeling the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates, the message will spread ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly also.

In summary, viral marketing is allowing people to giveaway or sell your info-product or service in order to multiply your marketing quickly over the Internet. And the same thing applies for applying viral marketing in your own niche of course.

The idea behind viral marketing is that you include your ad or link with the freebie people giveaway or use. Or in a product that you have sold to them with either resale rights or master resale rights.

Behavioural scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Ai personally am meeting hundreds of people during seminars and workshops I lead or that I a part of in another way.

Network and relationship marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. That is what relationship marketing is all about. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs.

Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do opt-in/permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.