"Viral Marketing For The Average Business"
 By: Ralph Ritoch of ViralHomeBusiness.com

Viral marketing is a powerful advertising technique that is often only an  option for marketing and advertising companies. On the internet the most popular form of viral marketing is the use of virals. Virals are websites where you join their program and they give you your own link into their website. When people signup through that referral link you earn credits for that signup. Often you can earn marketing credits for your signups, their signups, and down a network to a specified number of levels. Programs such as this have traditionally only been useful for network marketing and advertising businesses.

To effectively use viral advertising you must approach it like you would any advertising effort. First you must identify your target audience. The target audience for virals will always be other businesses. If your goal is to reach consumers you must take more time planning how you will reach your target audience.

The four common ways of reaching consumers on the internet are banner exchanges, popup exchanges, email and search engines. Anti-spam laws have made email advertising dangerous and an easy way to get your business shut down. Banner exchanges produce highly targeted traffic but only about 1 click per 1,000 to 10,000 impressions. Popup exchanges annoy web surfers and are often stopped with popup blockers, and search engines are unreliable. These facts may make doing business on the internet seem hopeless but its not. Viral marketing makes it possible to break through the limitations of traditional internet marketing.

The two primary sources of targeted traffic are search engines and banner exchanges. Knowing this your viral marketing strategy should be focused on improving search engine ranking and producing banner impressions.

Reciprocal linking is currently the an effective method of building traffic. Reciprocal linking is trading links with other websites, they link to your site and in exchange you link to theirs. Reciprocal linking is viral, but a very slow process. When more sites link to your site, your search engine visibility and traffic increase and more sites will want to trade links with you.

Generating a significant amount of banner impressions without traffic often requires a significant and re-occurring investment. For websites with a good conversion rate (earnings per visitor) this may be an effective solution, but it will cut deeply into your businesses profits. Most virals produce downlines in multiple traffic exchange programs. Sending a portion of that traffic to a page with one or two banner exchanges on them will over time produce a constantly increasing flow of banner impressions for your website. This page should be setup to promote each of the viral marketing programs you participate in to ensure the constant growth of your viral marketing network, and to make the best use of the traffic you have earned.

Starting your viral chain reaction is the most critical time for implementing a viral marketing system. As a general rule it is best to initially promote your viral marketing page to businesses with similar needs as yours. Most virals will become self-sustaining after 100 signups. This means getting your first 100 signups is critical for your success in viral marketing. Often the fastest and most effective way to launch a viral marketing campain is to purchase 10,000 hits on 10 manual click exchanges. Good virals often have a signup rate near 1 per 1,000 pageviews. 100,000 hits  should be enough to get 100 signups. The reason for using 10 click exchanges is to expand the number of marketers you can reach, and increase the rate at which your traffic is delivered. Most click exchanges are unable to deliver more than 10,000 hits in a month so spreading your traffic among multiple click exchanges will increase the delivery rate of your traffic.

When designing your viral marketing system you must think virally. This means identifying where your signups are coming from, what type of marketing credits they are producing, and what percentage of those marketing credits must be used for getting new signups to ensure a constant growth rate.

The last consideration for viral marketing is how to use your new advertising resources to improve your traffic and search engine visibility. The first place to look for potential link partners is in your network. Many of the people in
your viral marketing network will be webmasters, and trading links with them helps you in two ways. First by bringing more people into your marketing network. The second method of using viral marketing to build reciprocal links is to create a banner for your reciprocal link program, and using a percentage of your banner impressions to generate links to your website.

About The Author:

My name is Ralph Ritoch and I'm the webmaster of www.ViralHomeBusiness.Com. I started using viral marketing about 8 months before I launched my own website, when I finally launched my website it only took me 4 months to get a google pagerank of 5/10 and an alexa traffic rank in the top 100,000 . I was able to do this with only 1,000 total people in my network, and only an average of 20 people in each of the virals I was promoting.

Other top viral marketers have over 10,000 people in multiple virals and will tell you that you need thousands of signups to be successful. This is simply not true. This is why I feel I have earned the right to call myself a professional viral marketer because I have made it possible for the average business to utilize viral marketing without having to dedicate extensive resources. Most of the viral marketers with over 5,000 people in each of their networks have dedicated their entire business to viral marketing. Building an extensive viral marketing network takes time so knowing how to make the best use of a small network is the best way to use viral marketing to improve your business.