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Viral marketing is the new marketing and advertising trend right now, especially in the online scene. It takes advantage of the internet’s network effect to be able to reach a great number of people in such a short time.

Benefits of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing strategies offer several advantages to businesses.

- Easy to execute. There are several methods of sending viral contents or messages and all of them are easy to do. Among those methods are sending email, instant messaging, and using web sites. Sending viral messages through these media will not take much effort and time.

- Low-cost. As compared to sending direct mails, viral marketing proves to be cheaper and a more cost-effective method. With just a little investment on viral advertising, its power can reach even hundreds of thousands of people as compared to spending the same amount of money to traditional advertising methods. That is because the only money to spend is for sending the initial set of viral contents, then forwarding or replicating the message will not require additional costs anymore.

- Good targeting. With viral marketing, there is a huge probability that the message will reach people

When you purchased an item or availed of a service of a certain establishment and are satisfied with what you got, don’t you recommend that to a friend? And when you give your recommendation, doesn’t your friend buy or avail of it as well?

More often than not, we express our satisfaction with some product or service by telling our friends and relatives about our experience. Some of them will actually try the same product or service that we recommended. Essentially, we have just successfully advertised the product through word-of-mouth without the establishment having to spend a penny on it.

That is the idea behind viral marketing. Viral marketing is an advertising strategy that entices people to pass on a marketing message to their relatives and friends. It is called as such because of its similarity to an epidemic that easily spreads out, with an exponential growth, once an individual gets “infected.”

How did this marketing phenomenon start?

The concept of viral marketing, which is passing along a message, has been around for a long time now, even for centuries. There was just no specific name for it until 1997 when Steve Jurvetson, a venture

Image by toprankonlinemarketing via Flickr

Viral marketing has definitely gained its popularity over the global network. More and more businesses are adopting this marketing strategy to gain their fair share in the market. The approach developed by Hotmail in increasing its number of subscribers is one classic example of viral marketing.

How Hotmail Did It

Hotmail is one of the first web-based email provider that gives away email addresses for free. Their marketing approach starts by giving free web-based email addresses and additional services. Each of the messages sent with a Hotmail address has an advertisement at the bottom that goes: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.”

Then, of course, Hotmail subscribers will use the service to send messages to their friends and colleagues. These friends and colleagues will get the message and read it, and then clicks on the link at the bottom. They will also sign up and be a subscriber like what the sender did. Then these new subscribers will also email their own set