Let’s start off by defining what exactly viral marketing is. Viral marketing is the act of promoting any information, service or products that other customers feel compelled to share with friends, family and colleagues. This makes it a very good referral seeing that people are endorsing and re-advertising the message. There are several ways in which to virally spread a brands name on the internet and get increased publicity for relatively low costs and sometimes for free. These will now be discussed.

Viral marketing using Emails:
This does not refer to sending mails with virus’ attached, but rather the act of creating and sending out an email that people find funny, interesting, engaging or alarming, and in turn sending the email to all of their friends and email contacts. This leads to a situation where a single person can reach hundreds of thousands of people with no cost at all, in a relatively short time frame. This spreads the brand awareness and also creates brand personality.

Social Media and Viral Marketing:
Having an article on your website that stimulates people to share what they have seen or read is a great way to get traffic and brand awareness to your website and business. And where the social media aids in the viral spread of the content, is they allow the visitor to literally “share” or “send to a friend” from any specific webpage you want. For instance, if you read a funny joke on my website and I have Facebook, Twitter and Stumble-Upon Social media buttons on my site, you will be able to click a button and send to your friends on these social sites very easily.