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Remember that dancing baby from the Blockbuster television commercial? He did the jig to Rick James’ ‘Give it to Me Baby’ and even had a brief stint in Fox’s hit TV show, Ally McBeal. He started out on the Internet and went crazy from there and now anybody who is anybody knows who this dancing baby is.

This dancing baby is a good example of Viral Marketing, or Word of Mouth marketing; somebody saw the ad who told somebody who told somebody else who told somebody else and things just took off from there! This very same concept of Viral Marketing just may be able to do your business a lot of good.

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is just what it sounds like; it is infectious. With just casual contact, a viral concept or object such as this can easily be picked up by a person and transferred to them—like a real virus that causes a sickness. With Viral Marketing, things work about the same way. They are transferred from one person to another by contact or word of mouth, and that is how things catch on. The popularity of such objects is rapidly increased by the people who tell others; that is why it is also very commonly referred to as Word of Mouth Marketing.

Viral Marketing can be applied to a variety of items, from blogs to e books to videos or pod casts. If you have such items as related to your business or website, you should certainly make sure to do your best to make them go viral, and there are some ways that you can assist in the viral potential of your content.

Make Sharing Easy

One thing that you can do to contribute to the viral quality of your blog is to make them easy to share with other people. Viral Marketing is all about friends sharing with other friends and networking, and if people have to hunt for a link to find a way to share the great site or video or e-book that they found with someone, they will probably lose interest very quickly. The average consumer has an attention span of less than five minutes when it comes to things like that, so making it easy with a ‘SHARE ME’ link or a ‘EMAIL TO A FRIEND’ button can certainly make things much easier.

Make It Worth Sharing

If you have awful content, nobody is going to want to share. It sounds like elementary, but you would be surprised as to how many businesses and web masters post completely irrelevant content or just filler content and wonder why nobody takes notice of it. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of people on the Internet. While they may not have much of an attention span in general, they do read and they know the difference between good content and useless drivel.

Viral Marketing is the new Word of Mouth. While they are very closely related, there is no doubt about the fact that the term ‘Word of Mouth’ is becoming obsolete and Viral Marketing is the new term. Even people who do not know anything about Internet marketing have some clue what Viral Marketing is; it is pretty much self explanatory.

Viral Marketing may be one of the best things you ever did for your business, but it can only work if you do it right. You have to set yourself up for success, and your users will do the rest. All you have to do is get them to the site and make your content useful enough for them to want to share it with the people in their lives. Your content may very well go viral before you know it.

Useful tool for viral marketing, the Bookmarking Daemon.

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