Viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing is really cool because instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing, and let your fans do all the work for you.

Viral marketing causes a campaign to take on a life of its own, and start to spread like a virus, and everyone wants to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500 to 1,000 time’s greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements, and because of the high impact and low cost, it has become an extremely popular method of marketing.

What you Should Know

There are a lot of important points to know about viral marketing and here are some important ones:

Make people feel something

The most important thing of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication, and in return you want people to be filled with love or hate, be very happy or insanely angry, be an idiot or a genius, or deeply compassionate or supremely egoistic, and you want people’s blood to be pumping of excitement.

Neutral isn’t good enough, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Remember, viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

Do something unexpected

This point explains itself, since if you want people to notice you campaign, you have to do something different, something unexpected, forget about trying to promote your products as just being great, because everybody promotes like that.

Remember unexpected is the key that provides total surprise, and never
copy what’s already been done unless you are ultimately turning it into something different, or taking it to a new level of surprise.

Do not try to make advertisements

A big mistake is to think of viral marketing as just advertisements that people share, which is the farthest from what it is. Nobody cares about traditional marketing to the point they want to share it with others, since it is about promoting products with the same old tried and true methods that consumer senses have become dulled to over a long period of time.

Viral marketing is all about telling a good story, and everyone is looking for a good story to share with their friends, fellow employees, relatives and sometimes strangers they come in contact with, and when shared in this way, everyone remembers it.
Forget about you, your product or your company, and focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story, and even though you add you product into the mix, make sure it is not the most important thing.

Make sequels

After people have seen your initial viral marketing they think is very interesting, and been unexpectedly surprised, with their emotions at a high level, you have their complete attention.

Do Something with Consumer Attention

Most companies will simply do nothing and that is a big mistake, because when you have got people’s attention you need to act, and one the best ways of doing that is to give them more by making sequels, and this can be many things.

Never leave people standing with nothing.
People’s attention span does not last very long, so you have to act to give them everything now, and create a value in the need for them to come back for more.

Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding

Sharing is what viral marketing is all about, and everything you do to make that easier is going to improve traffic including allowing people to download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.), allowing them to easily embed the content on their own sites (Note: remember bandwidth issues), sending it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly, publishing it on varies social networks – Digg, YouTube etc., and allow people to add it the bookmarking sites. But be careful, because this easily is overdone, and you do not want to clutter up your page with too many “share me” icons.

Connect with comments

Another important element is to connect with your audience. Remember you got their attention; they are excited, now they want talk, and comments are one of the most effective ways to do this.

Always be mindful that the best viral marketing creates a strong emotion, and this means some people will really like it, while others will get very angry, and you have to accept both in your comments and you have to welcome both opinions.

You should also realize that it is not wrong to delete comments from people who attack another person, or if the comment is off-topic, but it is wrong to delete comments from people who just have a negative opinion.

And most importantly, connecting with people through comments means talking back, and do not add comments if you do not want to participate yourself.

Never restrict access

Viral marketing is also about creating something that gets a life on its own, spreads like virus and in order to do that, in order to become “viral”, it needs to be free.

Never add restrictions like requiring people to register, to become members, to download special software, to enter special “unlock” codes, or to do something in order to get the right link.

Finally, viral marketing is never about exclusivity, but it is about getting it out there for everyone to see.