Building traffic through viral marketing

Viral marketing is one of the most powerful tools in the world of affiliate programs. Giving away some valuable ebooks or similar products is a great way to boost your traffic and drive more customers to your affiliated merchants.

Providing a valuable product like an ebook for free download is a great way to start a viral marketing campaign. The ebook you give away does not need to be overly long or complicated, but it does need to be interesting and informative. After all, your goal is to get people to read the book and pass it on to their friends.

The secret behind this kind of viral ebook is the resource box, and the links it contains. The resource box will typically contain a link to your squeeze page, where visitors are encouraged to become subscribers, a few lines about yourself and your website and of course your name as the author.

One key to encouraging others to offer your ebook for download on their web sites is to make the ebook brandable. That means that the user can switch out links, or add their own, to make your ebook their own. This kind of branding is one of the hidden secrets of viral marketing success.

Of course the true success of a viral marketing campaign can be difficult to judge at first. That is because of the nature of viral marketing. A viral marketing campaign is very similar to word of mouth advertising in the offline world. The magic happens when one person tells another, through forwarding an email or pointing to a link, about this great ebook he or she has just found. The prevalence of newsgroups, email lists and other venues where like minded individuals gather have made this process easier than ever, and these ebooks, or at least links to them are often passed around in newsgroups, on email lists and in chat rooms.

The increasing popularity of blogging provides another valuable venue for viral marketing using ebooks and other publications. Links to particularly interesting articles or ebooks often appear in the blogosphere, and popular blogs can provide incredible amounts of exposure for even the smallest affiliate program.

There are many ways to get noticed on the internet, and a good viral marketing campaign takes advantage of the many outlets the web provides. As the internet world continues to grow and expand, it is likely that the value of viral marketing will only continue to rise. Many of the very earliest viral ebooks are still available on the web, and are still making sales for those that created them. This is proof that viral marketing remains much more than just another internet buzzword – viral marketing is truly a phenomenon that is here to stay.