Va Va Viral

There is a long standing cliché in the advertising business stating that a customer will tell an average of three people about a product or service they like, and eleven people about a product or service they did not like. Viral marketing began as word of mouth advertising and is based on human behavior. As we can see from above not all viral marketing is good.

Remember the Ponzi scheme and other related investment Pyramid schemes? They are an early and unfortunate examples of viral marketing. As the schemes expand investors are paid from the principal investments of later investors. Early investors are so enthusiastic that they recruit others resulting in tremendous growth. Eventually the pool of available investors ends and the scheme collapses. This was viral marketing at its ugliest.We will not consider this type of marketing.

Although the above examples of early viral marketing are a bit ugly, they demonstrate clearly that viral marketing is based on human behavior. If you see a good movie and tell some of your friends about it, that's viral. Viral marketing makes use of the natural tendency of a person to want to share something with others which they have found themselves to be informative, entertaining or amazing.

If you are blessed with an active imagination, you will uncover the many faces of viral marketing. Remember, you want to promote a product or service in such a manner that causes others to enthusiastically endorse and tell others about it.

A classic example of using the internet to virally promote a product of service is the way Hot Mail built there email service. They used what we now call a signature which asked you to let a friend know about this free email service. Gmail still uses a version of this concept. When you type in a new email address a little window asks if you want to invite them to gmail.

As the internet has developed and with that development brought advanced and interesting marketing techniques. For some time now ebooks have been the darling of internet marketers. With the ease of digital distribution and being able to include additional information and/or sales information via a hyperlink, ebooks can be distributed to large numbers of people.

Now if we promote our ebook in such a manner that causes others to enthusiastically endorse it and tell others about it, our ebook will have to contain great value for people to get enthusiastic and tell their friends.

Now make your ebook free. Free is probable the most used, most misused and the most still used word in a marketers vocabulary. Combine your free high quality ebook with an attractive incentive for your target market and you might just go viral.