Generating buzz through word of mouth will help drive greater sales and from your most important customers.

Viral marketing strategies can effectively generate traffic to your website by creating buzz-building campaigns that excite and energize your customer base. However, in order to most effectively execute a successful viral marketing project, it is important to build a significant understanding of your target audience to tap into their social and psychological network.

By creating articles or newsletters, for example, that resonate with your audience, you will encourage loyal customers to share the useful information or unique advice with their family and friends. Indeed, viral marketing is one of the most powerful forms of product support as it consists of unbiased recommendations from trusted sources.

Initiating a viral marketing campaign begins with the development of unique and attractive content for your most loyal customers. While articles that pertain to the product or service you are selling will help draw visitors to your site, creating resources that speak to your audience in a strategic fashion.

Once your marketing theme or ideas have been thoroughly cultivated, you can begin to build a viral marketing campaign around your most critical ideas. For example, post your articles on message boards or deliver special content directly to consumers. At the end of each article, add a link to your website and encourage your readers to send along the information to their friends. Your article, if delivered appropriately, will begin to make its way throughout the web passing from friend to friend and deliver a core business message that brings dramatic business returns.

Newsletters and ezines are also extremely effective means of capitalizing on viral marketing campaigns. As consumers become inundated with spam and other e-mailed "junk," sites that can break through the clutter by creating innovative means of communicating with customers via newsletters are likely to generate significant word of mouth traffic.

Not surprisingly, then, the newsletters and ezines that own the greatest popularity serve as the most effective platforms on which viral marketing develops. Utilizing word of mouth recommendations, webmasters and small business owners can generate more subscribers when they include tips, tutorials, and relevant news clips that are quick and easy to read.

Indeed, making a successful viral marketing campaign successful relies on more than just quality articles. The articles must spur the reader to act and send information unprompted to someone else. Therefore, online articles should serve as more than simple sales letters. They need to provide readers with something that is unique. Modern internet readers do not appreciate being used as business pawns and will quickly exit a site that wastes their time. By utilizing newsletters, then, to promote something more than just your business, online businesspeople can develop a better viral campaign.

Several high profile viral marketing programs can be used as a benchmark for the ultimate marketing success. BMW, for example, generated a tremendous amount of attention via a series of short film clips they published online at BMW Films. More recently, Burger King developed a commercial featuring a fighting chicken that rode the e-mail circuit through word of mouth.

Marketing experts believe that viral marketing is actually the most powerful form of product attention available to consumers. Unlike television ads or other paid advertising, viral marketing can not be purchased. Instead it relies solely on the recommendations of individuals. Yet, while a successful viral marketing campaign may be difficult to construct, the benefits generated by unbiased attention will make your business strong and successful.

? John Doetsch 2006. Online reprint rights granted as long as the article is published in its entirety, including links and resource box.

John Doetsch is founder of Websition.com, a website content provider featuring articles written by the Internet's most gifted authors. http://www.websition.com