As the search engine world becomes more competitive and the fight for website traffic deepens, web site owners now resort to other means and methods of attracting visitors to their websites.
The concept of viral marketing offers website owners and managers a real opportunity to bring in new and unimagined volumes and types of visitors with what can be a comparatively modest amount of investment.
The concept is relatively simple. A photograph or video is produced which will appeal to a particular target group and the media is then distributed on a number of key websites. These include YouTube and Yahoo Video for videos and Flickr for photographs. Social network sites such as MySpace and Bebo might also be considered as a means of initially seeding the media to show others.
This process is called viral seeding and represents the initial effort required to start the ball rolling. In theory once the videos are out in the public arena and rather like a biological virus, they spread amongst communities by word of mouth, e-mail, and publication on other peoples website via easily downloadable players which embed readily onto most websites.
One example...