As an affiliate, spreading the word about your products is your number one priority. If you aren’t constantly looking for new customers and for new ways to promote your products, you risk losing out on a lot of potential sales to the competition.  While the Internet has made advertising easier in many ways, it can also be tremendously confusing – believe it or not there are those who aren’t very familiar with it!

There are many different techniques for marketing online, but viral marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective ones.  With viral affiliate marketing, you can put the Internet at large to work for you, letting your message pass from person to person in an exciting – and potentially lucrative – ripple effect.

So What Is Viral Affiliate Marketing?

Viral marketing refers to any marketing phenomenon that revolves around the “word of mouth” concept.  As the name implies, viral marketing involves letting an infectiously popular advertising product or message loose on the Internet; as it gains momentum, it is passed along from person to person.  All the while, the product is promoting your product, service or business.  Just think about how many hilarious videos you were told to check out or were e-mailed this past year.

Viral affiliate marketing, then, refers to using those marketing techniques to promote your affiliate marketing program.

These days, affiliates and affiliate managers have numerous options at their disposal when it comes to viral affiliate marketing.  Whether you’ve used viral marketing before or not, the following tidbits, strategies and resources will help you become a savvier and more effective viral affiliate marketer.  Choose one or several of them to begin your foray into viral marketing; over time, you will become more comfortable with these techniques and will arrive at a solution that is perfect for you.

Viral Affiliate Marketing Techniques

Some of the most successful viral affiliate marketing campaigns are those that are completely custom-designed by business owners.  Many times, they combine several different strategies or techniques; other times, they use entirely brand new and completely innovative strategies.  Down the road, you may become experienced enough to devise your own viral marketing ideas; until then, use these techniques as a jumping-off point.

Videos

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years you’re probably very familiar with one of the most popular websites on the Internet, YouTube.  However, YouTube is about more than just funny cat videos and other random attractions – it is a great place to create, post and market a viral video.  By creating a YouTube account, you can set up your own page; on it, you can list your affiliate marketing site’s URL and other information.

The real fun begins, though, with creating your video.  While professional quality viral videos are viewed millions of times amateur viral videos have done just as well…if not better.  Just take a look at the “Baby Dancing to Beyonce” video which currently has over 6.6 million views in 2009!

I’m pretty sure the father who shot this video never dreamed his son would be a YouTube megastar or that his son’s little happy-feet would launch the website http://www.SingleBabies.com

Viral videos get that way by being something that people want to pass along to others.  Whether it’s especially catchy (like the video above), extremely informative or exceptionally useful, your video should be something that people will want to share with others.  As your video is embedded on social media sites and linked to in emails, people will be directed to your YouTube channel.  There, they will be able to learn more about your affiliate marketing program and will be able to visit your regular website.

Ebooks

These days, ebooks are very easy to create and simple to pass along.  This was NOT the case when I started back in early 2000.  Now however, there are several free programs for creating your very own ebooks, so you shouldn’t have any problem with the execution of one.   The issue, as with videos, is that you’ll need a catchy idea or a valuable premise that will prompt people to not only READ your ebook, but actually pass it along to others as well. Assuming your ebook is compelling enough, those who read it will want to share it with others.

Word of mouth concerning your ebook can easily start picking up steam; whether you offer it on your website or on an ebook directory, you should begin to notice a spike in the number of downloads that are made.  Within the content of your ebook, you should make sure to refer readers to your website, where they can find the products and services that you have to offer.  The more people that download and read your ebook, the greater amount of exposure your affiliate marketing program will receive – and the higher your profits will ultimately be.

Feeling A Little Creative?

Although videos and ebooks are the “big kahunas” of the viral marketing world, there are an endless number of permutations that you can play around with when doing this for yourself.  Consider a few of these great ideas for yourself; these are also great places to start brainstorming for your very own viral marketing concepts.

• Use a program to create your very own electronic post cards or gift cards and offer them on your website, social networking profile or elsewhere.  On them, include a link to your affiliate marketing URL so that readers can check it out for themselves.
• Hire a freelancer to create a simple digital game for you.  Have them incorporate advertising and marketing elements from your affiliate marketing program within the game.  If the game is playable and catchy enough, it should spark a decent amount of interest.  As it’s played, people will be taking in your advertising message and your business should enjoy a great deal of free, word-of-mouth exposure.
• Similarly, you could have someone create a simple but useful utility with the name of your affiliate marketing program marked on it.  Offering a free download for it on your website, blog or social networking profile will help it get spread around.  I see these all the time as mortgage calculators.

And What About Those Darn Widgets?

Ahh Widgetmania!  Affiliate marketers are turning more and more to widgets in their viral marketing endeavors.  Widgets are mini-applications; they are self-contained and can easily be dragged and dropped onto websites, blogs and other online places.  They are taking the affiliate marketing world by storm; it’s easy to see why.

With a few clicks of a mouse button, you can create widgets that highlight the products that you sell and then place those widgets on your social networking profiles and elsewhere. People who see your widget and like it can easily pass it along to others. In that way, widgets can be tremendously powerful viral affiliate marketing tools.

By their very nature, widgets are simple to use.  You don’t need a great deal of technical know-how or other training to use widgets effectively.  For the most part, you can jump right in and use widgets to promote your affiliate marketing program in no time flat.  However, if you want to strangle the market in a particular niche find a good widget/API developer and keep him/her happy.

Some Useful Resources And Tools

There is a plethora of information available online about setting up viral affiliate marketing campaigns.  You could kick your own campaign off and get it up and running in no time; use the following resources to help you get started:

• Viral Marketing Method – (New) A site that compiles a large number of valuable marketing tools for affiliates and affiliate managers. Many of these tools are completely free of charge.
• Easy Ebook Creator – Available for a very low price, this software program helps you generate slick-looking ebooks in record time. It’s so easy to use that you can come up with multiple ebooks without wasting a lot of time.
• Viral Manager – This site is a great place to get your feet wet in the world of viral affiliate marketing.  Browse it to gain valuable insights on techniques and strategies that you can use.
• Widgetbox – Find widgets.  Create widgets.  Very cool.
• Have some of your own viral marketing products/resources?  Let me know and I’ll grow this list out.

Viral marketing can make magic for any type of web site, business, or product. It has the potential to be a huge source for sales leads, targeted traffic, and on-way links. Surprisingly, tons of marketers are not taking the full benefits of this viral factor within their marketing efforts.

Most marketers deem viral marketing a myth, or an Internet folly that works once in a blue moon when an amazing product or web site turns up.

Realistically, viral marketing techniques can be applied to any type of web site, either big or small. These techniques can be used by anybody who is willing to put in the time put in use a few simple steps. Viral marketing that is done right can have amazing benefits, such as:

-build your brand or name recognition
-enhance your one way link popularity
-boost targeted traffic to your site
-automate your marketing attempts

Here are a few straightforward viral marketing techniques that you can try out on your web site, business, or product:

1. Spread the Word
Everyone has seen what word of mouth can do for all types of products. It is amazing what happens when people talk about a great gadget or movie and out of no where everybody knows all about it. It is in our human nature to tell everybody we know about any kind of amazing product we have found or bought. So, why not go ahead and take advantage of it?

Placing a straightforward “Tell a Friend” form on your web site is an easy way for your visitors to spread the word about your web site. Many internet marketers do not take advantage of this type of form. You can do the same thing to all of your newsletters, services, product, or any other aspect of your web site… at the end of all copies just add a few sentences asking nicely for your visitors to refer their friends if they found your service, site, or product helpful or useful.

2. Brand Your Site
It is very important to have some sort of logo on your product or web site. Branding all of your stuff is dire for people to take notice and become interested. Having a captivating brand name can be thought as a very “viral technique” within itself; so try to think of something that catches attention and has an original ring to it.

Branding gives people a clear picture of your product or site. People distinguish brands, so include your logo or brand on everything that is being produced from your business.

3. Ebooks
Knowledgeable marketers have sprung onto this new creation very quickly; they recognize the “viral” power that eBooks have to a business.

Ebooks are simply electronic documents that anyone can download from any type of web site and can be circulated around the web. Webmasters or marketers can also re-brand eBooks with their very own links. Ebooks that have high quality information get passed around the web extremely quickly and are amazing viral tools.

Anybody can go ahead and write their own eBook on the topic of their web site. For someone that is not writer savvy they can get permission to exploit a collection of articles that have already been written from the multiple article directories around the web. Two very popular article directories are: www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. Software for eBook compiling is pretty cheap and you can usually find it for free on the internet.

4. Viral Marketing Software
Many effortless software applications and products can be extremely viral and are often handed around or downloaded via the internet by thousands every day. These products are always something that most user’s desire: organizers, ecalenders, link checking software, personal planners, and so on. Most are simple desktop goods that stay on the user’s computer desktop, which happens to b e the most important location in the marketing stadium.

The preeminent examples of viral marketing software always have the business’s logo, contact email, and sales message…. All include live links to each of the above…. Which happens to be conveniently displayed somewhere within the product. Software programs such as these can be extremely useful viral promotional devices that can expand quickly throughout the web.

5. RSS
RSS is the newest addition to viral marketing techniques. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is an awesome viral marketing tool. RSS was originally used by many news crews to syndicate all of their news stories. It is also connected to Blogs since the use an RSS feed to hand out their content. RSS feeds that have a high quality are selected and put on display by a variety of different sites all over the internet.

If you have yet to gear up for RSS you should get started. You can simply use a site such as blogger.com (possessed by Google) which will provide you with a basic blog and RSS feed, so you can extend your product and/or message to targeted parties.

6. Video Seeding
Create videos utilizing popular video generation software such as Camtasia Studio.  Camtasa enables you to produce killer screen recording videos how to videos, product reviews, etc.  With an informative video posted (called seeding) to a popular video web site such as YouTube, MetCafe etc you can watch your traffic explode.

These are just a few viral marketing techniques out there that can help you increase your presence on the web, boost your traffic, and amplify your links. When used properly, these techniques will jump start your web site and spread it all over the internet and around the world.

Platform-A, http://www.platform-a.com, AOL’s digital advertising division, recently announced the launch of an affiliate marketing solution that links the buy.at affiliate network to the widget-based marketing tools of wildly popular Goowy Media, Inc.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years…Goowy Media, Inc. develops innovative online products and services that provide simple, intuitive tools for managing your digital life and expressing yourself on the web.  Their most popular products are yourminus.com and goowy webtop

This progressive move by AOL enables web publishers, like you and me, to generate additional revenue from a combination of affiliate, widget and viral marketing.  It will be exciting to see how Platform-A advertisers integrate/syndicate this new capability into their customized widgets for your blog, website, and even your desktop!  Very cool stuff indeed.

For more than a little while now I haven’t had too many good things to say about these blasted Widgets!  They seemed to just take up real advertising space and bleed my hard-earned web traffic.  However, I will gladly test these viral advertiser generated widgets out on my network of blogs/sites so my visitors and customers can snatch them up and redistribute them to the far corners of the Web.  Just think about the applications…MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A states, “This solution combines the best of affiliate and widget advertising in a solution that benefits publishers and advertisers alike.  Publisher revenue potential, brand exposure for the advertiser, and potential conversions grow virally each time the widget is downloaded by a consumer.”

I agree Lynda!  Now this is what we collectively mean by the moniker Web 2.0 people!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

Video has proven to be an immensely popular form of communication on the Internet.  Although it’s still in its infancy video on the internet is ALREADY huge.  Just take a look at YouTube which boasts over 200-300 million views per day! As any marketer can see we’re sitting on a goldmine of opportunity.  Why?

Simple. People would much rather watch something then read something.

If you learn the techniques you need now then you’ll be miles ahead of your competition in the video content market.  With the proper tools you’ll easily be able to increase your frontend and backend sales because you’ll be communicating with consumers in a medium they understand and trust.

With new video content tools on the market such as Killer Video Infomercials you DON’T need to stand in front of a video camera to make outstanding full motion video (FMV) infomercials that get results.  I know that comes as a relief to many people.

From a marketers perspective videos enable you to:

• Immediately build undeniable, genuine trust and firm buyer confidence
• Use “TV” Quality Infomercials to announce, promote and sell your products and services
• Generate a weekly video Newsletter to keep your customers and prospects informed
• Easily add video to your blog and create a video blog full of quality information
• Demo your product in real-time full motion video on the web and/or on DVD

If you’re looking for an EASY way to harness and integrate the power of video marketing into your business check out Killer Video Infomercials.  It might be just the solution you’re looking for.

http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

I read an EXCELLENT post tonight on an experimental project on Marketing Experiments.  The focus of their project was “Can Viral Video Clips Drive Targted Traffic”

From the recent explosion of YouTube and Google Videos as of late I was pretty sure I knew the answer.  However, the bottom line dollars and sense outcome of their ongoing experiment was a real eye opener to the efficiency of viral video marketing.

They seeded a total of 28 videos on the web for their experiment.  Here are their results in comparison to what it would have cost them to acquire prospects via PPC advertising:
”

What you need to understand: Although the video clips had no promotional message or content, 1.49% of viewers went on to become newsletter subscribers. In Just 60 Days, our videos were viewed over 324,000 times at no cost to us.

KEY POINT: With no additional work or money spent, we are projected to generate 382,444 views for October, which is more than we generated in the previous 2 months combined.

:: To create a context for these video clip results, we built a comparison chart to see how much it would cost to achieve the same results using Pay Per Click advertising.

These figures are based on the same number of views, the same clickthrough rates and the same conversion to subscribers. With regard to cost per click, we assumed a mid-range price of 30 cents.

Viral marketing has been around for quite some time but only in the last few years has it fully been recognized as a serious marketing medium.  Viral marketing campaigns such as viral videos and viral games are relatively cheap to produce and produce.  However, the right viral marketing campaign can potentially reach millions of potential prospects as they are passed along.

Viral marketing campaigns are really only designed to do one thing.  GET PEOPLE TALKING.  If you’re like me you get these videos or games from your family, friends, co-workers, etc. all the time.  Since they’re being sent to you by someone you know you are already receptive to viewing/playing them and passing them on to your sphere of influence.  It is this reason alone that make s viral marketing the most unobtrusive form of advertising on the NET today.

Successful viral marketing campaigns make a strong connection with their target audience while sutly integrating the brand into the content.  Advertisers make this connection by developing viral marketing campaigns that may be risqué, controversial or shocking to arouse interest.  And with the rise of popular seeding (how you launch your viral campaign) sites such as YouTube.com, KontraBand.com and MetCafe.com,  to name a few, getting your viral marketing campaign circulated to the masses takes mere days or weeks.

Here’s a great example of a viral video I came across while doing some research for my own viral marketing site http://www.EMTactics.com, which is still under development:

Most businesses already have a marketing budget or should.  However, how much if any has gone towards launching your first viral marketing campaign?  Give it a try, the public demands it =)