Free Viral Advertising

Now that you have built that great website, joined the perfect affiliate program, created the most sort after product, how do you get others to know about it?In one word, advertising! In a couple of words, lots of advertising.Well, let’s begin by reviewing some of the things we know about advertising before talking about viral advertising. What actually is advertising? According to one definition by Dictionary.com, It is “the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc., esp. by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc..” Notice how it says, “by paid announcements.” But does it have to be paid always? Not when we introduce the viral element of advertising. Remember, we want advertising for free!There are quite a few things you can do to get others to know about your site or business or product using viral advertising .Before going viral, lets talk about some of the things you can do with your advertising generally to start gaining some traction. You could start by telling your friends about your service or product, and have your friends tell their friends and so on. That is advertising by Word of mouth and there is a kind of viral element to that. If you have a website, you could make your site in such a way that the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest of them would love it. You could put a lot of unique content on your site, use meta tags to do on page optimization and build related links to boost your relevance and ranking with the search engines. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And because the search engines love your site, they will bring exposure as a kind of reward for your efforts.You could immediately go to any of the search engines such as Google, or Yahoo, or Miva and set up an advertising campaign, where you pay only when searchers click on your ad. This is called Pay Per Click or PPC advertising. You could even do the more recent variation, a kind of pay per incident called Pay Per Play, where you pay when searcher listen to your ad.There are also traffic exchanges and article directory sites that you can use to bring traffic and attention to your site or product. The later is called Article Marketing and is a very solid and profitable form of adverting. This is simply the art of crafting unique articles about your brand, or service or product and creating a web page for the article on your site and then submitting a variation of the article to the article directories with a link back to your website. If your article is great, other webmaster pick it up and republish it on their sites with your back link, bringing authority and traffic to your site.But these all cost time and or money. No advertising is really free or is it? Well, No and Yes! No because it will cost you time or money or both time and money to get your advertising momentum going. And yes, because once you get your momentum going, you can add a tweak to your advertising that can really make your ads free. That is the viral part of advertising.What are the quickest and simplest ways to get your advertising momentum going?Some of the simplest, easiest and most cost-effective ways to get your momentum going is by running solo, sponsored or classified ads.Solo Ads: Solo ads are ads sent to an email list or a list of ezine or newsletter readers with no other ads on it. Solo ads when sent to a target audience are very effective because there are no competing offers on the page. The reader is presented with your ad and your ad alone. That is why they are called solo ads.Classified Ads: When placed at the right place and worded carefully, classified ads are also pretty effective. Because there are other competing ads, they are not as effective as a solo ad. By merely tweaking your headline, text format and duration of ad placement, you can improve the performance of your classified ad.Sponsored Ads: In-between solo ads and classified ads are sponsored ads. Sponsored ads are placed at the beginning, middle or end of ezine or newsletter articles. By reason of their placement and size, they tend to perform better than classified ads but not as well as solo ads.Pay Per Click Campaigns are also quick and effective, but they can be expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. You could loose your shirt with runaway campaigns.Adding a viral twist to your advertisingThere a few ways you can add a viral advertising spin to your advertising campaign. But what actually is viral advertising? It is simply a way of bringing attention to your products, services, brand or campaign by leveraging the help and effort of others.Article Writing, as mentioned earlier is one way to bring a viral effect to your traffic. As you gain prominence in your niche, and other webmasters pick up your articles for publication, there is an element of viral-ness that kicks in and brings you additional exposure and traffic at no extra effort or cost.Once you begin to bring some traffic to your site or product, you can use other tools, such as tell a friend form on your site, with incentives to leverage off of the help of your visitors. Hotmail did it and exploded their subscription base. Recently, we have witnessed the explosion of social sites such as Myspace, Facebook and several others going from obscurity to notoriety in no time. But these are just social sites and they can provide you leverage if you just want to promote your face.But there are also sites that provide a platform for you to put a viral spin to your business for free. A quick search on Google will turn out a truck load of such sites. But how many of them actually produce the results they claim can only be known from actually participating. Without doubt, the way to go with your advertising is to go viral. Why? Because viral advertising has a compounding effect, it is free, and it is self-sustaining. You can see author resource area for more information.