Viral marketing is a digital-age marketing technique. It utilizes the breadth and reach, as well as the unique hyperlink feature, of the internet. In this type of marketing, a particular message is multiplied exponentially each time a person uses the medium.

If this sounds somewhat obscure, a familiar example will shed more light on it. In the early years of the internet, Hotmail was the first company to provide free, public e-mail service. Every time a person sent an e-mail message through Hotmail, a brief message about Hotmail and a link to the Hotmail website would appear at the bottom of the page. The person who received the e-mail message would, at least some of the time, click on the link to see what Hotmail was all about. 

This strategy is credited as one of the chief reasons behind the unprecedented success of Hotmail. Jeffrey Rayport, a Harvard Business School professor, coined the term “viral marketing.” He pointed out that, in certain types of marketing techniques used on the internet, the message spreads across the internet much as a virus does through biological populations.

The Article Virus

According to the experts in web marketing, a viral marketing strategy should have several essential ingredients. It should be free; it should be effortlessly transferable; it should use existing technological platforms; and, to show its viral nature, it should take advantage of resources that are owned by others. Article marketing is a near-perfect method of viral marketing.

You can write articles about topics related to the content of your website and post them on online article directories and ezines. The articles provide a link to your website. People who read your articles can click on the link and visit your website if they find the article interesting and want more information about the topic.

This is only one of the benefits that you reap from seeding the internet with your articles. Webmasters of other websites who are desperate for suitable content grab content they can use from article directories and ezines. In fact, article-publishing websites encourage other websites to use their content. Their only condition is that the other websites retain the links that are on the original page.

Through this viral technique, if your article is informative and well-written, it is going to be copied onto several websites from the article directory. As a result, the links to your websites will be displayed on all the websites using your article.

In other words, you are likely to get multiple visits to your website over a long period. As you can see, article marketing has all the characteristics of viral marketing. It is free and easily transferable, uses existing technology and exploits the resources owned by other people.