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Viral advertising is the art of encouraging other Internet users to pass your adverts around the Net free of charge. This is a very efficient, very cheap and yet very fast way of advertising. For example, you could compose an advertisement, send it to 100 surfers who each send it to 100 (10,000 people in a few hours), who send it to 10 friends, who send it to 10 friends. That means 1,000,000 people can have read your advertisement in a day.

Viral advertising is the art of encouraging other Internet users to pass your adverts around the Net free of charge. This is a very efficient, very cheap and yet very fast way of advertising. For example, you could compose an advertisement, send it to 100 surfers who each send it to 100 (10,000 people in a few hours), who send it to 10 friends, who send it to 10 friends. That means 1,000,000 people can have read your advertisement in a day.

And it is free and takes minutes to do, although it will indubitably take longer to plan. So, how can you start viral advertising techniques into your promoting? The most common ways of attaining this are by marketing a web site using email and instant messaging.

Viral advertising is virtually free, not completely free because you require an Internet connection and a computer, although you can do it from an Internet cafe anywhere in the world. Viral messages can be quite narrowly focused. How can you accomplish this targeting?

Well, it is quite easy actually because 'birds of a feather flock together'. If you send your message about one of the latest games to 100 pensioners, it probably will not reach 1,000 surfers, but if you sent the same message to 100 teenagers, you probably will reach 1,000,000 quite quickly.

This targeting combined with the ease of the click means that the response rate is fairly instant - so fast that the ad-message goes out in the morning and people are clicking an hour later, virtually as soon as they receive it. This is instant profits for hardly any expenditure.

However, because viral advertising is so swift, your marketing material also has to be up to the minute as well. For example, if a game manufacturer is offering a 20% discount voucher off a game starting from the 15th, you require to be ready to send out your emails or instant messages as soon as the 15th breaks. You could try the 14th, but you run the danger of your message being deleted or forgotten about and by the 16th someone else will already have sent it out.

So, what form do these viral marketing messages take? I can tell you some of the most common types, but really, the best ones are imaginative, unusual, quirky and unique. You could pass around a good joke or collection of jokes on a theme that matches the topic of your advert. Let's say gamers or computers, to stick with our example.

Years ago, there were some fantastic examples taken from computer support centres doing the rounds. I bet someone earned thousands out of them. You might pass around photos of birds, if you are selling bird seed; racing cars if you are selling tyres.

You could send out a personal recommendation, if enough people think that you know what you are talking about and at the bottom of each email that you send out is a link back to your sales page. These messages are normally forwarded en masse without editing, so your link goes around the planet on a tidal wave of viral marketing.