Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. Source.

Got that? Excellent! It’s an easy to learn and VERY effective technique, that should be a part of every online marketers arsenal (offline marketing as well).

Replicating your promotions in this manner will bring you RSS subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups and sales for weeks, months and even years down the road!

The following is 8 effective and (somewhat) simple ideas with which to achieve this. There are many many more of course, which we will surely get to over time.

1. Purchase Branding Rights To An Existing Viral eBook.

The following guest post is from Andy, who writes for and manages DaBlogger.com. What I like most is the fact that he writes it all from Personal Experience as you will see. This is after all, the best way to write an article when applicable .

In the past few years, I have watched many social bookmarking sites grow and have huge effects on the internet. Many people don’t realize that they can use these sites to promote their own sites and get vast returns. Below are benefits that I have seen these sites have on other websites.

#1 - Instant Traffic
Social bookmarking sites can give your site an instant traffic boost. Getting one link of homepages of digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us or any other bookmarking site can give me huge traffic boosts.

Most traffic will be targeted since your post will be under specific categories and you can attach keywords to your posts.