You've probably heard of viral marketing. It's a form of marketing that spreads in a manner similar to real viruses or email viruses - the idea is that just as it's easy to catch a cold, it's easy to catch an idea.
Viral marketing uses existing social networks to spread brand awareness, a new idea, or news about a new product. And when used properly, the marketed idea spreads more and more rapidly. It depends heavily on generated excitement; for instance, when Star Wars fans heard about the last movie in the series coming out, it took hardly any time to spread from one end of their gossip networks to the other.
You can leverage the ideas and principles behind viral marketing to increase your online sales, particularly if you are focused on a small niche market that you know well.
First, The Article
The most important part of your strategy is the development of the viral package. That's your article, and you want it to spread to as many people as possible. You must make it exciting. You must make it attractive enough for others to share it with their friends, and the friends with their friends. And you must make it available.
The article is just the carrier of your personal information, don't forget. The package is important, but your personal information is the one vital piece of the article.
Your article can be about anything that excites your niche community. If, for instance, you are selling things to dog breeders, news about a new breed of dog could be very exciting. Important information about a communicable doggie disease is also going to spread well, though you must be certain to end on a caring and positive note. If you're marketing to submariners, an interview with Tom Clancy would be a hot item.
Ideally, your article should be a timely and an un-covered piece of information, but the hot news isn't always there when you're ready to start viral marketing. What you can do instead is use an article that has wide interest but addresses a topic that hasn't been fully covered yet.
Second, Spread The News
Once your article is ready, with your intact name and a hyperlink to your site at the bottom, you're ready to get it out to the public. You can start by posting it on your site and referring to it in your blog; that often generates interest. If you go to any popular web forums, you can also spread your news there, with a link back to your site where the article is.
You should definitely place your article on the ultimate viral marketing tool: an article directory. Article directories are repositories of free articles webmasters may download and include on their own websites free of charge; the hitch is that the article must be unchanged by the person downloading it, and it must retain the resource box, a section with the author's name and a URL link back to their web site. By uploading your article to one of these databases, you can encourage it to spread to people you don't even know.
Third, Be Patient
Your viral marketing article is probably a slow-acting virus; you won't see results right away. Instead, you'll find that you have to wait, sometimes a significant amount of time, for anything major to happen to your site. But you may notice fairly quickly your number of website hits going up. You may also be told about your own article by someone in your niche market community; that's always fun!
But the best thing you can do while you're waiting is to develop another article to build into a viral marketing package, repeating everything you did with the first one. A lone virus doesn't spread very well, but if you can send out several viruses in succession, you may start seeing a significant boost in the number of customers coming to your site. Be ready for them; have a working signup link for your emailing list or your enewsletter, and schedule yourself a little extra time in case you have work to do from increased signups or sales. The internet is a great marketing tool.