Even though the term viral is likely to give you goose bumps, Viral Marketing, nonetheless, has become a buzz word for most website owners now. Viral Marketing, to be precise, works on marketing strategies that depend on individual website users who pass on marketing messages to their network, thus giving rise to very fast growth and rampant exposure of the message. Incidentally, this type of marketing is being stated as viral marketing as the messages are transmitted from one person to another as happens with communication of human virus. However, there are several types of viral marketing strategies that are presently in use online and are described below.

• Free give away, such as creating an information-rich e-book and then giving it away free of cost. You  may also enhance its attraction if you endow the right to sell the book to the receiver. This satisfies the lust for gaining something useful, accurate and well researched text.

• Adding an attractive marketing message to e-mails routinely. If you take a look at Yahoo e-mail or Hotmail messages, you are sure to find the footer promoting their free e-mail services that are seen by all the recipients.

• Running an affiliate program, which of course, is not altogether free. In fact, affiliates are paid either for every sale they make or every customer they refer to a third party website. But this has a great advantage since it ensures their marketing of the website (and its product) to their total network without any hassle.

• Generating multimedia content. Many businesses engage their marketing messages in the form of entertaining game, video or images, which website users often find interesting enough to send across their network sans any financial incentive.

Apart from the strategies posted above, you may need to pay attention to some of the elements that work together for the successful implementation of viral marketing campaign which is listed below.

• Having a scalable platform is necessary. Since viral marketing is sure to generate plenty of interest in the business over a very short period of time, you need to ensure that your set up and the server can withstand that sudden influx of traffic.
• The ability to make use of common human behavior patterns is equally important. Because only then can you direct your viral marketing program to attract the attention of people.
• Keeping your message compelling, concise and easy to assimilate will go a long way towards spreading it far and wide. In other words, make your message easy for transferring.
• Utilizing the resources of other web users will also help develop your viral marketing campaign. For instance, Affiliate programs often use ads on others’ sites while people use their own opt-in lists to divulge free information about products pertaining to your marketing message.
• Tapping into existing networks prove useful, too. Since most website users are endowed with ever growing online networks that include e-mail address lists, friends, colleagues, placing your marketing message within these well known networks will help it go viral much faster.

Bottom Line

One of the biggest advantages of viral marketing concerns its self-propagating functionality. After you have launched your campaign, it will keep on spreading and growing without receiving any input from you. Also, you can start your viral marketing campaign at a low cost budget since you will be mostly using digital media and online communication methods.