Future Business Ideas

The idea behind viral marketing is to get your customers to market your products or services to their friends. In this way, once you get your viral campaign going, the efforts of your users should be enough marketing for the effect to last a long time. The most successful viral ideas are based on giving a product or service away for free.

Something many who doubt viral marketing bring up is the fact that you are apparently losing money by giving away something you could sell. There naturally has to be a way to make money from the product, otherwise you would be better of by selling it, as they suggest.

There are two effective ways to make money with viral marketing: the first is link building and the second traffic generation. This article focuses on the viral traffic you can generate by giving your products away for free.

Traffic is the one thing all Internet marketers are after. The specific way you use does not matter; as long as you can keep the traffic rolling in to your web site, you can generate money by selling your own products, selling affiliate products or simply through cost per click (CPC) ads like Google AdSense.

How should you go about creating a viral campaign if you are after viral traffic, then. There are only two things you need to make sure in order for your product to generate traffic: the product needs to be targeted and it needs to make the users visit your web site. All else depends on how good your product is.

A viral product needs to be targeted to the same user group as the site you want to generate traffic for. It is important because the rate of conversion will be much higher for visitors that are interested in related topics. This applies regardless of which method you use to monetize the web site.

Creating a targeted product is usually simple: if your site sells cars, you might give away free bumper stickers; if the site is an AdSense site about weight loss, you could use a free video tutorial. Sometimes it is also important to know your market in more detail. For example, YouTube is more popular among young people, so you should not use a YouTube video, if your target market has a high average age.

The second problem you need to find an answer for is how to make sure those using your free product will actually visit your web site. The simplest way is to only make your product available through your site. Then those that recommend your product will ask their friends to visit your site, generating free viral traffic.

The weakness with this strategy is that it hinders the growth of your campaign. Campaigns where you let the users redistribute the product have a much higher potential to exponential growth. If you permit redistribution by others, you need to find an alternative way to point the users to your site.

A simple example of how you can accomplish it are viral e-books. You can write an e-book about a tpic without giving away all information, while mentioning the source of that information in the end. That source is, of course, your web site that needs the viral traffic. A similar approach can be used also with other kinds of viral products

Viral traffic has the potential to grow at an exponential rate, and is a great way to make money with free products. As long as the product you create is targeted enough and the hook you use to get the users to your site works, the viral traffic your site receives can continue and grow with practically no further work.