Well, first of all: what is viral marketing? Officially is to make your product or service like a BUZZ term/word, mainly through the ‘mouth-of mouth’ channel. To start with an effective Viral Marketing Campaign: you have to check which media you want to use and which fits into your product/company. I recommend you use more than one, if possible.

1. Discuss about subjects around your product/service on forums, chat services etc. Putting the offer on a squidoo lens, mention it in Twitter or a free blog where people you can put comments on and with one click recommend it to a friend. To get Twitter automatically rolling, you can use two famous ‘traffic softwaremachines’: twitter traffic and Automation software for Twitter.

They both give 60 days money back guarantee, so you can check these out yourself to see if this is something which suites in your strategy and your Viral Marketing Campaign. Or you can check out our latest review on the best twitter tools where tweetadder comes out as number 1.

2: Use social media

For example: you can offer a link with a ‘discount coupon’ for your email contacts, if they forward it to 5 contacts or more. Another possibility is to use your contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn groups, MySpace, which is offering the same or a free trial of your product which you promote through one person and he/she will give it to several people who in turn will promote it to several other people. This is what makes a viral marketing campaign so effective.

3. Submit your product to an affiliate network

If you are offering a product or a software which can be sold on the web. Affiliates will promote your product or service on their web. You pay a small general fee but in most times you only pay when you sell (for example you can submit your product to the largest affiliate network in the US, for more info: Better Merchants. Better Affiliates. PepperjamNetwork.com. Your Viral Marketing Campaign: Take the 5 most important steps to run it effectively

4. Create an innovative email campaign

Use your own contacts and keep it personal. To get the ball rolling you need to offer a special product or service which people are starting to ‘talk’ about. You can ‘push’ this a bit by only offering it for example when they reply to you together with 10 of their contacts (so you get these contacts then as well and they are already informed).

5. Submit your product for (paid) review, general PR sites and so on.

There a sites which brings Advertisers and Bloggers together. A good one is: (get) paid for blogreview
As an advertiser you will get more traffic and more relevant links which will be also good for your Google ranking. You can set up your own criteria (for example: blog must be of relevancy and has a minimum ranking of 1.000.000 on alexa.com).

Conclusion is that if you start ‘shouting’ it all loud, people will hear your message. But of course, just as in the real offline world, it should be something interesting that you’re shouting about…otherwise it is only annoying and you will definitely hurt your brand for a long long time..Wish you good luck with an effective viral marketing campaign and fun!