Viral marketing is perhaps the most powerful form of promotion for your website or blog. How else can you take your marketing efforts and multiply them many times over, all for free? If you want to get more traffic to your website or blog then one of the best things that you can do is have your linkbait, product, or idea spread virally.

What is Viral Marketing?

A good definition of viral marketing is:

A strategy that encourages individuals to pass on marketing messages to other people. Viral marketing creates the potential for exponential growth. Like a virus, viral marketing is based on the premise that growth will spread exponetially.

Most good examples of viral marketing come in the form of video, but it can be quite easy to spread something that involves taking an action and passing it along.

How to Market Virally

In order to market your website or blog virally you will need to create (or fabricate) something that warrants action or response. Tell your users your blog is shutting down because Google said you are in violation of thte rules of the Internet, host a contest that involves other authors writing about you, or simply write something that warrants being passed around such as a great opportunity to contribute to a worthy cause.

The Power of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is extremely powerful if you have a good quality product because it multiplies your marketing efforts. As a website owner or blog owner there is only so much time, money and effort that you can put into promoting your website or blog. By getting others involved your resources become limitless as you are no longer just depending on your own personal time, money and effort to get your advertising message out. You’ll be leveraging the efforts of everyone who happens to get a copy of your message and passes it onto someone else.

Take a look at my recent viral experiment, our iPod Giveaway. It had over 240 entrants, and over 50 bloggers took the time to write about it on their sites. On the graph of RSS subscribers below, can you tell where our contest began?:
wdw rss

As you can clearly see, after the launch of our contest in September, the curve of our RSS count looks a little exponential (and by my definition viral). This is just one simple example of how easy it can be to have something go viral. Take a look at your own site or business and try and find something that works for you.

HINT: With Christmas around the corner it shouldn’t be that tough to come up with a clever idea spread some holiday cheer! Get on that idea before someone beats you to it! :)

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