In 2001, Business Week cited advertising for the Blair Witch Project as a striking example of viral marketing.  The advertising campaign insinuated that the footage was “real”, filmed by a group of college students that had disappeared, presumably leaving only their video camera behind.

Teasers were first seen on TV and then posted on the internet.Viewers were highly encouraged to share the footage with all their friends.The film grossed over $248 million and cost only $35,000 for the production.Who wouldn’t want to see sky high profits like that?

Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” was listed in Wired as a highly successful example.Although it is quite difficult to assess the amount of new customers that Burger King has attracted with this specific campaign, it is a popular website.

Some more “down to earth” viral marketing examples for those of you that may be trying to grow your own business are newsletters and automated e-mails campaign.With very minimal software, you can drive visitors to your website to sign up for your newsletter.  That gives you their e-mail address.

With each newsletter, you might ask for the e-mail addresses of friends that would also be interested in your products or services.  You can see how this could increase your contact base relatively quickly.  You don’t have to worry about being called a spammer, because the customer requested the newsletter.

One of the most effective viral marketing examples, according to many experts, is the single line method used by “Hotmail”.They offer people to sign up for free e-mail.At the very bottom of every complimentary email a person sends, there is a single message that reads “Get your private, complimentary email at http://www.hotmail.com”.The website address is essentially a link.

All that they had to do was stand back and wait for thousands and thousands of people to sign up.  People love free stuff.  The most effective campaigns always offer something free, whether it be playing with a virtual chicken or reading a newsletter relevant to their interests.

When you are able to get people to tell their friends about your product or services, the ripple effect spreads like a virus, which is why the phrase was originally coined.There are many viral marketing examples.  Anyone that is not at least trying to do it is not growing their business as much as they could.

It is essentially no different from word of mouth advertising, has parallels to multi-level marketing and it is very effective.  The right campaign for your business depends on what your company sells or the services that you offer.  But there are six basic elements that make up an effective strategy.  First, you have to give something away.

Correct, you are in business to sell items, but people love free give away items.What item you can give away depends on your company.It may be a short piece of information, like a newsletter, delivered via e-mail.You might offer a unique item, like a doormat, but in order to get the “special” doormat, the customer might have to buy it.

Candidates during the recent presidential campaign used this method to get donations.When a person signed up to receive their free bumper sticker, they were directed to tell some of their friends.They entered the e-mail addresses of some of their friends and a viral email marketing strategy was started.

The second element is the ability to transfer the information effortless from one person to the next.E-mails are exactly right for this.With a little software or a dynamic marketing company, the entire system can be automated to the point that you never need to do much of anything.

The third element is to have the ability to handle the increase in business.  What if the virus spreads and you become inundated with new orders that you are unable to fill.  That’s one of the things to think about before you partake in a viral email marketing campaign.

The fourth and fifth points are to take advantage of usual motivations and existing communication networks. Common human motivations would include greed, the need to be loved, as well as popular and understood.

The existing communication networks are those e-mail addresses that nearly everyone has.Sociologists say individuals have a network of at least 8-12 people with whom they communicate with often.Your main goal is to enable each of your customers to provide you with those e-mail addresses or, send your message along to others.

That’s how viral email marketing works and is the last element of the campaign; taking advantage of the resources of others.

Click Here For A Succesful Viral Marketing Strategy

It doesn’t count if you have a killer invention or a fantastically designed website, if folks don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it great. Worse of all, your venture could just get Blown-up.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites these days, there are still some of those that can help you with an added boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

The term "viral" in viral marketing or viral advertising does not mean "computer virus". It has a totally different meaning. A computer virus is not used to grow your online business; that would ruin you. Not too many people appreciate pop up ads and the like.

A Viral Marketing Review

Viral marketing or Viral Advertising is a marketing strategy/method that is used to exponentially grow public awareness of one's product, services or business. They use many forms of media to reach out to the community without truly promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive measures that may possibly get a person hooked and be obliged or pleased to essentially pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

Click Here For A Successful Viral Marketing Strategy

In a nutshell, companies ride on the notion that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their associates and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, Hilarious Article and such, which one might pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its invention.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. odds are better that an email will get opened if they reader knows the sender.

To spread viral marketing, many companies give discounts or freebies or bunuses. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost benefit of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your Website and your company. You get to generate a gush of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

For the most part every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. If you are not serious about your business then you will not use this technique and your business will more then likely fail. One strategy alone like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does not work. A combination of that along with Viral Marketing is a great strategy to catapult you ahead of your competition.

Viral marketing is a somewhat ingenious strategy to get people to know about your product or services. Like the old game "post office" you get others to pass your "ad" along. They are one of the cheapest and not investing in it will more then likely kill your business. It requires a cool idea, an "out of the box video", a funny story…There are tons of ideas still left. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. Hotmail is a well-known example of this. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Viral marketing - viral advertising can ignite your business. You should give it a try. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Click Here For A successful Viral Marketing Strategy

If you want to increase your brand’s popularity and if you want to increase your product sales, you should consider running a viral marketing campaign. If you have never done it before, it is about time you considered doing it. The results will be beyond what you could have imagined possible.

The biggest advantages of this marketing technique include:

1.The cost is very low to run a viral campaign. The USP of these types of campaigns is that they use existing communication networks and reach thousands of people in a short time frame. The marketing message is usually generated and spread via emails marketing, articles, blogs, software, and social networks – all of which are free.

2.These campaigns usually contain an incentive for every user. The campaign is most often created in such a way that the customer who gets the marketing message usually has an incentive to give it to his friends. Use your imagination – from free software programs, to free wallpapers, free email services, free buttons, to free PLR articles, it is unlimited. So, the user gets rewarded for their effort to spread the word. This prompts him to do it again and again – thus widening the scope of the campaign.

3.It is a snap to share a marketing message through a viral marketing campaign. To reiterate, these campaigns use free email services and social networks to reach out to end users. The end user finds it easy to share messages with associates and friends.

4.Viral marketing is all about utilizing many other people’s resources. For example, if you give a free article away to someone and ask him to place it on his website, he will be happy to do this. After all, he gets fresh content to his site which is great for him. The key thing is – you get to place a text link or an image link at the end of your article. In this manner, everyone who reads the article will be tempted to click on that link and visit your site – especially when your article is interesting and informative. This gives you free, highly targeted traffic without spending any cash at all.

As you can see from what I have explained above, a internet viral marketing campaign is probably the best way to put your business on the map. You can create your own campaign if you have the time it will take to launch it and the creativity to make it interesting. If you don’t, you can enlist a great marketing company which will take care of all the details and run a successful viral campaign. So, weigh in your options and make the right decision today.

Remember Mary Kay.  They are overpriced cosmetics that are not any better than anything else on the market. But the company has continued to be highly successful for one reason.Women buy them and then suggest that their friends buy them as well.

In order to be a successful Mary Kay representative, you would believe that the product is better.  You would then tell all of your friends that the product is better.  Next, you would ask your friends to sell the cosmetics.Then, they would tell their friends, and those friends would tell their friends, and so on.

That’s the real definition of viral marketing.  It is word of mouth advertising.You broadcast to your friends.  They tell their friends and the process continues exponentially until you, the business owner, have generated more sales than you might have ever dreamed possible.

It is commonly referred to as a virus, due to the fact that it spreads and multiplies, easily and swiftly throughout the population.Any advertising strategy that invites individuals to pass along your message to others is called a viral marketing strategy.

There are historical examples of this viral marketing strategy.“Hotmail” is one example.They usually offer a free service and every time that an person takes advantage of that service, by sending an e-mail, they also broadcast an advertisement to the recipient, asking them to sign up for their free e-mail service.

People love things that are free.That’s the essence of the definition of viral marketing.  You offer something free, in order to generate sales at a later date.  You have to be willing to wait.  It may take months to see the sales figures climb, but eventually they will.

he free certificates or gifts keep your company’s brand right in front of the consumer.It is not unlike the free calendars that banks, florists and insurance conpanies offered, before the advent of the internet.  All year long, every customer saw that company’s name and anyone that came to their house saw it too.

Currently, you can reach thousands and thousands of your customers with one regular e-mail.What’s real definition of viral marketing?  It is putting your name out there, where everyone can see it.