Viral Marketing - Where Free Is Priceless

The healthiest online business is the ones that use viral marketing techniques. And certainly health is wealth in this instance. This simple yet effective method is amazing in terms of:

• Traffic generation
• Brand building
• Link building
• List building
• Profits

And it all happens at practically no investment. How can any Internet market not cash in on viral marketing? It is not as if viral marketing is a new phenomenon. It is as old as time itself - and just as important.

There are plenty of viral marketing techniques that can be harnessed to advantage, and with the advent of Web 2.0, it has become even more easy - and fun - to make use of these techniques. What can be nicer than creating a powerful message - and then sitting back and letting others do the work for you? All you need is a memorable message that is exciting enough to have the immediate urge to tell everyone.

Lets look at some viral marketing techniques that are doing the rounds very successfully:

• Ebooks and reports are among the ideal viral marketing tools. It costs almost nothing to create an ebook. You can either offer it for free in various ways or sell it. You can let your recipients rebrand it and sell it as their own. You can offer resale rights. The main thing here is to ensure that you provide a link to you on each page so that all those who receive it in the chain can come back to visit your website.
• Free optin ezines are used as a viral marketing technique to build targeted lists which is a must for any online marketing business. By creating a useful ezine that's either html, email, web or blog based, it caters to the hungry information seekers on the internet who can then sign up to continue receiving it and also tell others about it.
• Offering viral articles for reprint is another effective viral marketing tool. The beauty of this is in its simplicity through a well-written article, optimized for search, with the author's resource box that provides a link and a call to action. This can also be reprinted for free, so long as it is reproduced in its entirety - resource box and all. As the article makes the rounds on the article directories and gets posted on various related websites, the traffic pours in through the link in it.

Today, Social marketing sites and blogs are a gold mine for generating targeted traffic. As part of the Web 2.0 platform, they allow the Internet marketer to effectively use viral marketing techniques in an interactive way with his prospective customers.