Viral marketing is the process of promoting and selling products or services through the use of messages or ads that are self regenerative. Viral messages or ads include a pass-along tag line that encourages recipients to send or forward the message to other people.

Viral Content - Viral content is media that is received by people and forwarded (regenerated) to other people. Aside from added addressing text and comments, the core viral content may be regenerated many times. Good viral content may include recent news, controversial information, or highly entertaining jokes, images or video.

A good way to gather content that may be suitable for viral messages is to subscribe to newsletters, groups, blogs, bookmarking sites (to identify the most popular media), or setup alerts (such as Google Alerts) related to key subjects you wish to promote. After potential viral content is identified, additional research may be performed to allow for content that is enhanced with additional interesting content or factoids.

It may be helpful to include interesting images in the viral content that can rapidly get the attention of the recipient. Such images may be obtained from stock photo (small cost) or shared photo web sites (no cost in return for references).

Seed Distribution List - A seed distribution list is a group of recipients to which messages are initially distributed. The seed distribution list can come from members of social networks who already have a relationship with the sender and may, as a result, be more likely to pass on the information.

Copy Tag Line - A copy tag line is a message contained within a media item that encourages the recipient to forward the message to a friend. The copy tag line should be placed in a prominent location (hard to miss) and strongly encourage or motivate the recipient to share with their friends. For example, “Find this Very Funny”, “Don’t Wait”, and “Be the First to Send this to Your Friends” are copy tags lines that offer motivation.”

Referral Incentives - Referral incentives are reward offers given to people who recommend products or services to other people. Referral incentives can be in the form of gifts, money or discounts. As an added incentive to the referring person, the offer may include a discount that is also provided to the recipient of the referred message.

This fgure shows the basic process of viral (referral) marketing. This diagram shows that viral marketing starts with a message that contains some valuable information elements along with a referral message (viral message). The viral message is sent to people who have a likely interest in the information it contains. When people receive a viral marketing message, they are encouraged to forward the message to their friends. This example shows that it is likely that recipients will forward the message on to others who have an interest in the information. This multiplies the effect of the marketing campaign as the message is received by many more email addresses than the initial list contained.