Internet Marketing- Viral marketing

When most people read or hear "viral" used in the same sentence with the word Internet panic sets in.  The fact is that viral marketing is a good thing and the unfortuneate use of the word viral was coined long before viral meant something negative.

The unfathomable and extremely rapid reach of the Internet makes it an appropriate tool for marketing. A little sinister and much more pervasive type is viral marketing, where self replicating strategies are applied for achieving the desired result.

The birth of such ad campaigns happened during the big bubble period of the Internet. Initially it was limited to attention grabbing URLs employing the mnemonic technique; in short these phrases could be memorized easily. This marketing technique is also cheaper than print media and much more pervasive. It is Internet based, and with the advent of newer technologies, deep penetration, ease of deployment and highly inexpensive operations, it is viable for most business classes.

Types of Internet Marketing: Broadly speaking Internet marketing can be divided into two main categories; the traditional and cloaked campaigns.

The traditional Internet marketing tools, from the nascent days of the net have undergone several coding transformations and are utilized for reaching Netizens. These include innocuous banner ads, the famous Google ad sense, various nagging pop-ups declaring various benefits, legitimate email campaigns run by various companies for their clients, phone and now SMS ads to some extent. Such a campaign can be effectively measured and priced accordingly; the revenue of Google is a testimony to that. It is also a point that the prohibitive cost of such campaigns became the nemesis of many sites during the big dotcom bubble.

The cloaked or better known by its popular sobriquet, Viral Marketing, is the poor mans success mantra for Internet based advertisement. As the term itself signifies, a virus self replicating property has been put to good use for advertising. It may not be a classical virus which just keeps emailing itself endlessly but a subtle message with a social cause or against a reprehensible act which results in mass emailing and lightening speed. Some of the typical means are:

Utilization of Social Networks: It has been a main legitimate means adopted by the many. The site may launch a promotional offer with certain incentives to those who forward it to their friends and acquaintances. The Readers Digest has utilized this technique of obtaining large databases using the snail mail. Then there is generic forwarding of interesting emails, with a catchy little ad in the end or a joke or a small flash movie embedded in it.

The Ad Virus: This is another form of virus disguised as an ad and replicates itself faster than any other means but with the innate risk of getting eliminated by the advanced anti virus programs on almost all the email networks. But even if it breaches just one percent, imagine the potential.

Blogs, SMS Text and MMS: The seamless integration of mobile telephony with the Internet has just expanded the reach of softcopy ad campaigns.

Hituk Patel is an Internet Marketing expert. Do you want to make huge money very quickly with this butterfly marketing manuscript?