Viral marketing is not only the fastest way to get your marketing message seen by millions of people, it’s also free. This makes it a very attractive method for getting traffic to your website.

However, to be successful with viral marketing you have to be creative.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a great looking website, if people don’t know that you exist you aren’t going to make it. That may sound a little harsh, but if you aren’t getting any traffic to your website, your chances of success are slim to none.

Viral marketing is a technique used to promote the awareness of your product or service. It is a simple yet sneaky way to let people know about you and your products, while at the same time getting them to pass your marketing message.

This aids in not only building your emails list, but also growing your profits through additional traffic to your website. All it takes is a great idea, a good game, a funny story or video and a bit of creativity to get the ball rolling.

In essence, viral marketing is simply allowing other people to giveaway and/or use your free product or service in order to multiply your marketing. Here are some quick tips and ideas you can use to start your own successful viral marketing campaign:

1. Write articles!

You can allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their ezine, newsletter, magazine or ebooks. Just request that your resource box listed at the bottom of each article be included when your article is used published.

2. Create mini reports, videos or software applications!

Create (or have someone else create for you) a small report, ebook, video or software applicaitons and allow others to give them away. You can make this even better by allowing them an option to place an short ad in your free product. This will give them even more incentive to pass along your product to their visitors and subscribers.

3. Use your freebies as bonuses!

Allow people to use your freebies as bonuses for other products or services they sell. Just make sure you include your ad or a link to your site on all your freebies.

4. Offer free hosting!

Sign-up for a reseller hosting account and offer people a free website or hosting account. Since you are giving away the space, require them to include your banner ad at the top of their site.

5. Offer a free service!

Allow people to provide your free online service to their website, visitors, or ezine subscribers. This could include be free email accounts, email consulting, search engine submissions, etc.

6. Design your own website templates or graphics!

If you have a flair for design, create a number of website templates, headers or graphics and give them away as a free download in exchange for their email contact details.

These are just a few ideas, but as you can see with a
little creativity, and by using viral marketing strategies, you can reach out to thousands of people over the Internet with much less effort to build your email list and your profits. 

Learn How to Master Article Writing and you learn how to master the internet!

The different forms of paid traffic that you can use to boost your website traffic.

I know we’ve discussed this before and I’m sure you know that every business needs customers. Without them you won’t have anyone to sell your products to. And the more traffic you have the more people are able to sell your products to.

But just like any business, whethere it’s in a building, in the mall or on the internet, not everyone that visits your store will buy. However, the more visitors you can get, the more the opportunity you have to convert a greater number of people to buy your products.

Many large online companies generate tens of thousands of visitors a day, yet only a small percentage actually buy. However, that small percentage is enough to provide them with substanial profits.

So how do you get traffic? How do you get more people to come into your “virtual” store?

Many success stories get their traffic from paying others to drive visitors to their websites. Yes that’s right. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.

Advertising is the key. The more people that know your site exists, the more visitor’s you will get to visit your site. It’s common sense. While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, these don’t always generate the same high volume as paid methods do.

The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click programs like Google AdWords, Yahoo Search and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the biggest share of PPC traffic, so it’s a good idea focus on them first.

Just keep in mind that they are not the only game in town.

It is important constantly test new sources of paid traffic. Social media advertising is another viable option. MySpace, Facebook and eBay have their own self-service advertising programs with the ability to target your business demographic.

Buying traffic through banner networks is another option.

Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on.

You can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs. There is also one more form of paid traffic that I want to talk about today. It is a bit unusual, but it begins with purchasing an existing or expired domain name.

One of the primary advantages of an existing domain name is that it already has traffic flowing to it and chances are it is already a search engine optimized for targeted key words. Remember, it takes time for domain names to work their way into search engine listings and if someone has already done that work for you then you are ready to capitalize on their ground work as soon as you take over the name.

If you take the time and you combine some of these techniques and apply them consistently over time you will get an impressive boost of traffic flowing in to your website.

Learn How to Master Article Writing and you learn how to master the internet!

Using Digg and StumbleUpon to make friends and generate even more traffic
to your website. The two biggest traffic boosters amongst social media
websites are Digg and StumbleUpon. When used properly they can have a huge impact on your traffic stats.

Let’s start off with on how to use Digg to drive traffic to your website.

Digg works by allowing users to give a thumbs up ‘dig’ or a thumbs down to whatever they read online. It’s pretty much a way to rate different pages on the web so that the best stories get the most attention.

If you can manage to get a story on to the home page of Digg, then you can expect to receive thousands of extra visitors to your site. To get started you will need to submit your story to Digg, and then encourage other people to vote for it.

 You will need a good number of votes to have any chance of making it to the home page – and picking up the thousands of extra visitors. If you can get someone else to submit the story, or if it happens naturally, that is much better than submitting it yourself, and this will give you a much higher chance of getting the votes you need.

If you want to give your story the best possible chance of getting votes, you need to attract the reader’s attention quickly. This means that it’s important to have an interesting headline and description. Remember, there are plenty of competing articles and the reader can’t read them all. Give them a compelling reason to read yours.

It also makes a difference if your content is fresh and relevant. If you are writing on topics which are current and hot, your chances of getting votes increases enormously. Don’t forget that readers are more likely to vote for something which is of genuine use to them, so if you can produce an article with genuinely helpful information, you will certainly gain votes.

Many sites end up being linked by other people, so as an added bonus you will find that this will also improves your link building status – which will be contributing to your Google search engine rankings.

Now… lets talk about how to use StumbleUpon to generate traffic.

StumbleUpon can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your website, but only if you avoid the traps that so many StumbleUpon users fall into.

As with so many other Web 2.0 social networking sites, the traffic is not predominantly people who are looking to buy. If your website is blatantly obvious in terms of its marketing and promotion, then your attempts to drive traffic will simply be a waste of time.

StumbleUpon users are looking for information and will almost never give the thumbs up to any blatantly commercial site. The biggest mistake of all is simply to stumble and promote your own sites.

 Gaining traffic through social networking sites takes preparation, work and interaction with the social community. The first, and most obvious, factor in determining traffic levels is the number of other users who give you a thumbs-up recommendation.

For this to happen, your page will obviously need to be top quality. StumbleUpon is not a technique which can be used to drive traffic to poor quality landing pages. As well as this – the number of reviews which your page has is also highly relevant. Simply, the more reviews you gain,  the more traffic you drive.

Another major factor is the authority given to your account. If you want to use StumbleUpon to drive traffic, you will need to become active in the community and regularly stumble and review other people’s sites.

You want to generate as many friends as you can within your allowed limit. If you review other peoples profiles, you should find that a certain number of these will return the favor.

Having a profile with an increased number of reviews is instrumental in giving you more authority. Slowly but surely people are learning how to use Digg, StumbleUpon and the many other tools to drive traffic to their websites, increase awareness and achieve success. There’s no reason you can’t do the same.

Make sure you look for your next issue when we will discuss how to use a “tell a friend script” to get even more traffic to your website.

Learn How to Master Article Marketing and you learn how to master the internet!