If you have any real interest in internet marketing you have to have heard of viral marketing.

Viral marketing describes any strategy that actively encourages people to pass on your marketing message to other people. This activity creates the awesome potential for exponential growth in exposure and influence. Like viruses, viral marketing strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the marketing message to thousands and then to millions of new people. And each new person exposed to your viral marketing message has the potential to further expose dozens, hundreds or even thousands more people.

I hope that concept excites you. If it doesn’t, you need to check your pulse. This is the stuff of miracles. Launching a good viral marketing campaign can reap benefits far beyond anything you could ever hope to achieve through your own efforts alone. It is the highest representation of leverage. Once you have a ral viable viral marketing message it actually leverages leverage itself.

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit.

Viral marketing works so well online because instant communication is now easy and inexpensive. Digital formats of data and information make replication simple and cheap, nearly free. From a viral marketing standpoint, one of the most significant things you must do is to simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without loss or alteration. Shorter is better. And shorter still is better still.

While crafting your Viral Marketing Message focus on K.I.S.S. –

— Keep it Simple Stupid.

Shorter and easier to remember will always out perform long and complicated.

Also you absolutely must take advantage of common human motivations.

The desire to be cool, the desire to be accepted, the desire to impress others, popularity, lust, love, fear and greed drive people. These powerful emotional responses result in a strong, nearly compulsive urge to communicate, and that produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages as people spread ideas and thoughts that allow them to grasp, or hope to grasp those qualities.

The overwhelming majority of people are highly social. They crave conectedness with the group, with other people. they genuinely like to help, and need to be liked.

Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. and most have around 100 people in their extended contact group. People on the Internet develop networks of personal relationships, too.

They collect e-mail addresses of people they like. They bookmark favorite website URLs. They visit popular forums and blogs where they feel comfortable and surounded by other like minded people.

Affiliate or associate programs thrive on these personal networks, as do e-mail discussion lists and most importantly viral marketing messages.

Learn to insert your viral marketing message into existing communications between people in their existing social networks, and you can massively and quaikly multiply its dispersion.

When you can design a viral marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, you have a winning campaign.

Here are six essential keys to help you launch your ownr viral marketing campaign and do it the right way.

1. Purchase the branding rights to a viral E-book. Allow people to give away your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away. This will just continue to spread your ad all over the Internet.
2. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really have a great tool. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website. Some people don’t have one. Just include your banner ad at the top of the board.
3. Do you have a knack for web design? 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 include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice in tact.
4. Write an E-book. 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.
5. Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or E-books. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article.
6. You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for those products that provide “branding rights”. That is where you can include your own name, website, and contact information.

Do you have other ideas for launching a viral marketing message? I’d love to read them, just hit the comments link below and tell me about them.

Here are some more resources to read about viral marketing on other blogs:

• HowToSell.info - has a nice article about using simple scripts to make potentially viral PDFs from text and html files.
• Open Garden - has an interesting theory that marketing people don’t “get” viral marketing because it is a product design issue. I would submit that while product desing is a great way to induce viral advertising, Such as hotmail, where the very use of the product spread the marketing message, that is something differnet from viral marketing. Viral advertising is a byproduct of viral product design. ICQ is better if your friends have it too.

  Viral marketing, however involves making the marketing message itself viral, ala “where’s the beef”. The hamburgers were not viral (we hope), but the message was. So too the free informative and actually valuable ebook that promotes another paid product. Still, very much worth stopping by to read his thoughts.

• David Meerman Scott at WebInkNow.com - Shares a detailed analisys of his viral campaign with a free ebook on PR and press releases.
• Rohit Bhargava - Shares the danger signs of an unproductive viral marketing campaign with his article “5 Signs Your Viral Marketing May Flop”.

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Dane Morgan wrote this at around evening time: