What is Viral Marketing
Published on March 4, 2009 |
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is the process of putting in place factors that motivate other people to pass your marketing materials around the internet in such as way that the motivating factor gets
passed along with the materials themselves. Often the motivating factor is money and so each person is motivated to pass on your marketing material because they expect or hope to make money from doing so.
Viral marketing can be an extremely powerful way of marketing your product or service because when done properly it can widen your potential market quickly and cheaply. With the advent of the internet, viral marketing has really taken off as technology has increased the potential speed of propogration of marketing messages and automated some other key processes that are required to make a viral marketing plan successfull.
For example, suppose you have an ebook that you want to get widely distributed. You could set up an affiliate program and offer membership of that program to anyone who buys your book. Once they’d made a purchase, they could then promote the book themselves in return for a commission on each sale. This motivates them to promote the book and it also motivates buyers who buy the book via the original customer’s affiliate link to promote the book too.