Posted by Ray White on December 15, 2009 Comments (2)

You can have the best-looking website and the most effective product on the planet, but if nobody knows about it, your business is toast. How can you get the word out fast?

Viral marketing is a term that is sometimes tossed around in the internet marketing arena. It implies spreading the word about a product as quickly as a virus gets passed around during flu season. Remember that old television commercial where “you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and  … “? Well, that’s the basic concept behind viral marketing, only each person passes on the word to way more than two friends.

Hotmail is cited as the first product to use viral marketing. Every message sent through Hotmail included a footer that contained a link to get your own free email account from them. Now everybody who has ever used email has a Hotmail email address.

How can you cash in on viral marketing?

Get creative. Write a short report or ebook and let your customers give it away for free. Make a hilarious, yet informative video and post it on YouTube. Come up with a cool flash game. You need something that people will pass around like a hot potato, with your product or website url linked to it. It has to be something that people want, or want to share.

It sounds like work, and it is. But once you are done, the rewards are limitless.