Many people may have heard the term “viral” associated with different styles of marketing and wonder what some of them are, but specifically what is viral marketing? Well, the simple answer to the question is that this type of product promotion is a form of advertising, which deals mainly with the infiltration of the Internet, with advertisements, logos, and critical product placement in a manner that will most easily entice people to buy their products.

The idea behind viral marketing is that if you can get the product up in multiple places on the web and in front of as many eyes as possible for as little money as possible, you are doing some really good marketing on a budget. Most of the companies behind this style of promotion are smaller businesses that just want to get the word out about their product but don’t have the money to hire a public relations firm or spend money on advertising.

One of the more effective methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. While you have the product, your JV partner may bring his customer content list of thousands and his marketing skills to the project. In most cases a JV will benefit both parties involved with an equal split of the profits and possibly the work.

Another form of getting your product, to race around the internet world, is to set up an affiliate program with 100s of individuals and business promoting your product. The difference between a JV and an affiliate, is the affiliate will only get paid a percentage of each individual sale personally made by them.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what is viral marketing, then you should realize that it is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can do. First of all, using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is a fairly ingenious way of getting your product or service out to the public. You can set up a site, get all of the relevant information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.

Theoretically, just adding whoever to your profile isn’t going to do you any good as they are likely looking to connect with friends and won’t be interested in your product. The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find those with similar interests. Say that you are a writer marketing a new book. Adding other writers isn’t going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre, well, that’s a different story.

Some viral marketing ideas include sending out chain letters with information about your product buried within a story that urges people to continue resending the letter to all of their friends. This is a decent idea, but if you use the chain letter to try and collect money for something that doesn’t exist or run a scam for a business, then that is fraud and is a crime. You have to be careful and make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws.

Now that you have an answer to the question of what is viral marketing, you should also know that using viral marketing plans too much can cause some problems. If people feel they are being slammed by the product, then you are going to find many of your potential clients turned off by your aggressiveness.

Just remember that you’re trying to get the word out and tell people about your idea without being too pushy and you should be just fine.

What happens when you search on the Internet? How do you get to what you want? Most likely, you’ll skip all the banner ads, and enter your own search term. You’ll skip the “sponsored search engine results.” Maybe at this point, you can’t even see them. You probably don’t even see the shaded results on the right, or any of the advertising or web infomercial type results. It’s a lot like television: if you don’t have a video recorder, you just tune out the commercials mentally.

Clearly, if you’re marketing your goods or services on the Internet, those sorts of sponsored results and banner ads give you a really dismal return on investment. Sure, they’ll generate some clicks, which will in turn generate some sales, but they’re only worthwhile for big, relatively rich companies.
Ideally, you want to optimize your site so that it naturally shows up high on the list. The playing field is much more level than in any other form of marketing. Small companies can own their much larger competitors.

In case it’s still not quite clear what ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search means, its’ just the ‘editorial’ rather than ‘sponsored’ search results for whatever search engine you use. If you can fine-tune your site to land high in the list of organic search results, your marketing on the Internet will have the desired effects on your business. Unlike the paid advertisements, you can’t buy your way in. The only way to punch your ticket for this dance is natural search engine optimization.

The playing field is relatively level, but large companies do have some advantages when it comes to natural search engine optimization. They tend to have large quantities of inbound links. This affects search engine results substantially. Vendors, affiliates and partners often link freely and unbidden to the corporation’s site.

Smaller companies, on the other hand, have some advantages too. Smaller companies tend to be more willing to pursue optimizing their site to generate results organically. Smaller companies also have little or no red tape to sift through in order to get a decision made on optimizing their sites. Smaller companies tend to be more willing to outsource, perhaps because they tend to not have significant resources internally. Natural search engine optimization is both a technical and non-technical problem. Simple steps like figuring out what keywords people will search for are important, as well as understanding the technical aspects of how a search engine indexes pages.

Huge corporations, tend to view natural search engine optimization as a very small piece of an enormous puzzle. Not only that, they’ve been doing without it for years. Quite possibly, they’ve even been doing without the Internet for years. The necessary steps to successfully marketing on the internet in order to get the desired effects on your business are often too much to get through committee after committee and miles of red tape. Smaller, leaner competitors can thus swoop in and take full advantage of organic search engine optimization and get better search engine results.

The internet is a vital part of anyone’s business plan, and by utilizing the top 101 marketing strategies you are sure to increase your business. While traditional marketing is still important, online marketing has been increasing in popularity.

Therefore, the playing field has become much more competitive. If you are looking to level the playing field a bit to give yourself a chance to compete, then it is crucial for you to make use of the top 101 marketing strategies. Using these marketing strategies aggressively will without question improve your business.

There are several different methods of marketing to choose from. For example, there are some short term strategies out there that can bring you some quick results. While these strategies may be able to give you quick bursts of traffic to your site, they may not be able to do much else.

These methods are primarily short term methods that will only give you temporary results. These short term methods usually include: bulletin boards, ads, and some search engine optimization techniques.

There are also plenty of long term methods included in the top 101 marketing strategies that you should consider. These marketing techniques will usually take a bit of work and will take some time before you really see any results. They are definitely worth pursuing though as you will find that the results you receive by this method will be much longer lasting and potent.

These long term strategies are designed to bring a steady flow of traffic to your site over a long period of time. The only draw back to these methods is that they take a much longer period of time to enact than do the short term strategies. These long term methods include: article marketing, press release marketing, and opt-in mailings.

When looking at the many options available for both short term and long term marketing strategies, you will find that both free and paid options are available. The free marketing strategies will no doubt be the first to catch your eye, and there are some great ones out there, but keep in mind that the free strategies will take quite a bit of time to bring into fruition. They will also require quite a bit of work on your behalf as well, this is why paid marketing techniques are often recommended. Paid marketing techniques will get you the quickest results and you will not have to do a lot of work yourself.

If you are looking for the best results, it doesn’t hurt to put both short term and long term marketing techniques to your disposal. All of the available marketing strategies can help you out by increasing your business and web traffic; so make use of each of them. There is some strong competition out there, but if you work at it, you are sure to succeed.

If you are ready to get your site in the top search engine results and have your email filled with customer orders, then it is time to put the top 101 marketing techniques to work for you.