Viral Marketing is a phrase which was first coined in 1997 to describe the extraordinary growth of Hotmail which, by December of that year, when it was only 18 months old, had generated over 8 million users. It was quickly snapped up by Microsoft for $400 Million. In the time since then it has been attempted countless times. Some have succeeded (Skype, Google, YouTube – for example) but many have failed.

The term “Viral Marketing” was first used to explain the remarkable rate of growth experienced by Hotmail. It was coined by the financiers handling the deal for Microsoft.

Viral marketing is best described as the modern form of word-of-mouth marketing. It delivers exponential growth to online businesses by generating its signups and sales through its own existing customer base. As the base grows bigger the message spreads faster and exponential growth, at sometimes more than double-rate, is seen.

Hotmail’s use of viral marketing was simple. It had a clickable link appearing at the bottom of every email it sent for its customers:

“Sent from my free Hotmail account. Get your own free web-based email account Here!”

Its difficult to imagine how Hotmail might have grown so big so quickly without this simple viral trigger at the bottom of every email sent. To obtain the same exposure with conventional advertising would have cost millions. Yet this cost them nothing.

So what can we learn from the way Hotmail leveraged the Internet to invigorate viral growth this way? Well, the first thing to note is that if your product’s message is to spread fast and wide, then the method people use to spread it must be easily tapped into. With Hotmail that was easy. They couldn’t use the product without spreading it virally at the same time. And, I believe, with varying success, it is transferable to other industries and products aswell.

These days there are numerous means of encouraging viral growth online. One of the most successful has been with the use of rebrandable ebooks. These are sometimes called viral ebooks because, when transmitted from one person to the next, they do alot more than a single PDF file can on its own.

Rebrandable ebooks enable your readers to stamp their own affiliate links for your product within the pages of the ebook. By doing this, they are the ones who will earn commission on any sale their copies make so they are motivated to rebrand and pass-on, rebrand and pass-on etc.

Using rebrandable ebooks for viral growth is the model of an automatic business which was systemised with My Viral Spiral (MVS). This is a website script which uses viral triggers, viral motivators and viral seeds (rebrandable ebooks), to grow its membership base automatically. When an MVS site is put alongside your other web properties, or used in conjunction with your affiliate programs, you immediately give added benefits to your members. Using the functionality of your MVS site, they can grow their own lists, by rebranding and passing on your ebooks, while simultaneously growing yours.

MVS has a unique combination of viral factors built into it which together enable anyone to build a list from scratch without needing costly traffic and hosting fees. It also adopts a 3-dimensional rebranding feature which means that every new member immediately has two ways to make money from each new member they generate.

And yet MVS is often miss-understsood. Many people imagine it must be an affiliate marketing script, like Butterfly Marketing or Launch Formula Marketing. But the truth is, MVS is a script which automates the front-end and generates automatic flows of traffic from the activity of its members alone. Therefore, whatever traffic it is fed, it multiplies it.

Yet people have had mixed results with MVS. Some say their members haven’t been active enough, while others say their lists have been so active that their lists grew very quickly.

One member even claims to have got 1,200 signups in the first five days he had the program running.

It seems likely that a key component to success with this viral system comes from putting in place a constant flow of traffic. The best way of creating that is with a blog on the front end, which is regularly updated. That way it will continuously, and increasingly, draw targeted traffic from the search engines.

Then, with the signup widget from MVS installed in the sidebar of the blog, a percentage of this organic search traffic will join, rebrand their ebooks, and pass them on by driving their own traffic to the squeeze pages they are given by the system.

After reviewing many methods which might be deployed for engineering exponential growth, MVS has stood out as the favourite. It contains an energetic mix of viral motivators, viral triggers, viral slip and viral seeds. Working in combination, these factors work startlingly well to invigorate viral list growth and sales on auto-pilot.