Your First Viral Marketing Campaign

Viral marketing campaigns can be exciting and if effective literally explode traffic to your website or blog. Following are a few ideas for types of products and services you can use for your campaign, but the first step in any marketing campaign is to determine your goal – what is it exactly that you want to achieve with this campaign.

So, assuming you’re ready to go and have your goals in place, here are six ideas to help you start your first viral marketing campaign:

1.Purchase the branding rights to an E-book. There are two type of branding rights.

Read the agreement carefully for any purchase you are considering because there are general similarities you don’t want to be surprised later on. Master Label Rights (MLR) generally allows you to give away or sell the product, but you cannot change it in any way or remove links. A Private Label Rights (PLR) agreement allows you to make changes and even list yourself as the author. In most cases this agreement is preferable because it allows you to polish the content, add links to your site or squeeze page, incorporate your keywords and in general make it your own.

For the purpose of a viral marketing campaign, you want to encourage your readers to pass your free E-book on to as many people as possible. The goal being that those people will also pass the book on and it will continue to make its way around the Internet.

2. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, this can be a great promotional tool to generate additional buzz and traffic. For instance, you might allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website.

One thing to keep in mind about forums and bulletin boards that no one ever really talks about - they can quickly become very labor intensive as a result of such things as technical issues, questions and payment problems (declined credit cards and refunds) if yours is a paid membership forum. If you have staff to manage the site that’s one thing, if you are a solopreneur you’ll want weigh the benefits against the additional time that will be involved for you.

3. If you have a knack for web design you could create some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just be sure to include your well designed ad, a copyright notice and direction that this must remain intact, and lastly of course links back to your site.

4. Write your own E-book and allow people to place an advertisement in your free E-book if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine subscribers.

You’ll want to do a little background research on any potential Joint Venture (JV) partners to make sure their niche is complimentary to yours (not directly competing with you) and to get some idea of the size of their audience.

5. Write articles that pertain to your product or service and list them with the major article directories, such as e-Zine. As the author you will include information about you and a link to your site or squeeze page. People can go to these sites and reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zines, newsletters, magazine or E-books with your author’s resource box at the bottom of each article.

Artical marketing in itself is a fairly standard form of internet marketing, so to make your articles stand out and begin to create that "viral" effect you could write a series or write about a controversial topic in your niche or industry.

6. If you still haven’t found the right vehicle for your campaign you can do some research on the Internet to look for joint venture partners or free product giveaways. For example, a quick Google search for “JV Giveaways” will bring up nearly 100,000 listings!

On a final note, what makes a campaign go viral are your end users. You can only kick things off – it’s up to your customers/subscribers/riders to keep the momentum going. That will only happen if your product offering is worthy of passing along and generating the desired “buzz” effect.

Good luck!