Viral marketing has grown to be one of the most effective and successful methods of getting customers in the online world of business and has been referred to as an advertising miracle. This is because viral marketing can make your traffic grow exponentially from just one new visitor to become an avalanche of potential customers to your website.

Done well, viral marketing is an inexpensive marketing method with a rapid and widespread response. The term viral marketing became popular in 1997, when used to describe Hotmail and their viral marketing campaign. They attached an advertisement for their service to each e-mail sent. Customers spread the word because the very use of the service promotes further use.

Burger King is one company that has used viral marketing very effectively. In 2004, they created the Subservient Chicken website, which is one of the worst web-sites the writer has ever seen, and then used viral marketing principles to get traffic to the site. Word spread quickly, with the help of a 'tell-a-friend' link, the site received 10s of thousands of hits in the first few months and eventually millions. Viral marketing succeeds by bringing in massive traffic when the right tools and strategy are used.

Viral Marketing is not just about when your existing website visitors, subscribers and customers refer you to others or when other webmasters send traffic to your site. Everybody knows that recommendation is by far the best way to be introduced to others. Viral Marketing is about using 'leveraging devices' to multiply each stage of the recommendation process. Viral Marketing is about making it advantageous for others to help you while helping them-selves and it being advantageous for you to help others while helping yourself. The motivation is not altruistic it is ice cold commercial common sense.

Here are a few examples of viral marketing.

Submitting Articles to Article Directories and Submitters is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get instant free publicity to your web site and is also an excellent way to get links back to your site but it only becomes viral marketing when you load your article with your links and allow the article to be copied without alteration and used by any-body, anywhere.

Writing your own e-book is another method. Write a book on a subject you are familiar with and, of course, there is a market for, pack it with links to your web-site and/or your affiliate sites. Enjoy the retail sales income and the commissions from your affiliate links and for as long as you can get the full price. Then reduce the price to half with a blaze of, "I've made my money and now I want to help people etc." "The price will be going up again soon etc."

When you've milked it almost dry and the retail sales drop off give it away free of charge with full retail rights and allow others to sell it and keep 100% of the retail sales money, (a good opportunity for more self gratifying BS about helping people). Many people will give it away as a free bonus and you continue to get the sales from the affiliate links. This is an old 'Guru' trick that's been going on for years. Easy long term money!

Using a 'refer-a-friend' script on your site can be very effective. Put a simple "TELL A FRIEND" link that leads to an outgoing e-mail window, pre-written from the visitor to who-ever they choose with a message and link back to your web-site. Brilliant and very effective!

Indeed, viral content is a wonderful concept and especially important to us all because we all want to expand our activities and businesses. But if you've never used viral marketing, these are a few ideas where you can get started. These ideas all make good viral marketing. We will not write about other methods such as: great lists, videos, email accounts or chicken and hamburger sites, those are for you to investigate.

We're going to finish off this article writing about Viral Traffic Expansion Sites, there are several: the TrafficPowerHouse, FreeViral & VitalViral are three of them, the rest you'll find in Google. You actually get a clone of their web-site; put your own web-site on theirs in THE prime position, quite free of charge. You then market the clone, others join and market their own clone with your web-site in the second position etc. etc. The concept is explained fully on their web-sites, they are just great and they're all free, exponential expansion is what they provide and they're a lot easier than writing an e-book!

Only you can decide which method of viral marketing is best for you. Inform yourself while surfing the Internet. Be doubly aware of the sites you visit and look out for a viral marketing element that the site is uses. Can you do it too?