Viral marketing, viral advertising, virales marketing....it goes by several different names but essentially the term simply means to spread something online like a virus. Not a virus in the computing sense, but in a biological one.

Viral marketing examples often cite Hotmail as being the first truly successful viral marketing campaign. It was a simple viral marketing technique but proved to be hugely effective. By placing a referral link at the foot of every email sent by their users, they achieved tremendous growth without relying on conventional advertising. They just let their users spread the word, often without them even realizing they were doing so.

Since then, viral marketing has become an accepted method of promoting and branding and has been employed in countless different ways, probably the most common in recent times being online videos. This article however deals with a long established method, the use of viral ebooks and reports.

I touched briefly on the topic of creating viral ebooks in my hub Creating Your First Ebook and I now going to use a real life example to illustrate both how to create a viral PDF document and the purpose behind doing so.

For the purposes of this hub I am going to use a book called Viral Clickbank Footprints which was created around ten months ago and was aimed at Clickbank affiliates.

Viral Ebooks Are Free for a very good reason. Viral marketing relies on the simple premise that you want people to spread the word. A free ebook is a great vehicle for viral marketing, you just need to give people something they want or need, and provide a great benefit for spreading the word about it.

A free viral ebook is a very different animal from a book that you are planning to sell. Whilst the methods used in the creation of the document are basically the same, the content is likely to be rather different. In the case of Viral CB Footprints, I wanted a document that contained rebrandable affiliate links. On this occasion I used ViralPDF to create these links, so that when people read the report, they could then download a re-branding program and change the affiliate links to their own before passing it on.

Including too many affiliate links in something you intend to sell is a bad idea, Clickbank even have rules regarding the amount that can be put in something being sold through their marketplace. With viral marketing however, the re-brandable affiliate links will be more welcome.

There are several benefits for those who download the report. Firstly it's free so they have nothing to lose by reading it. Secondly it will help them to improve their Clickbank earnings using the free services promoted in the report. Thirdly, by re-branding the links and passing the report on to others, they will benefit by gaining referrals into the free programs and stand to earn not only more Clickbank commissions but also commissions on those who decide to upgrade to paid memberships at any of the sites in question.

So where is the benefit for the author in creating such a report? Initial costs are pretty low, I outsourced the graphics which was really my only out of pocket expense. I would say that I have recouped that investment many times over, just by giving away a helpful free report. How, you may ask?

Well, just as others can give it away with their own links in, so can I. Each time someone reads the report and decides to re-brand it, they will need to first sign up for any of the services they are not already using and they will probably do so through the links in the book. This means I grow my referrals in each of the programs without doing anything much at all. If they don't join all of them, the links they don't modify automatically revert to my own.

If they buy upgrades, I will earn commissions and if you look at the nature of some of the programs, you will see how it will also spread links with my Clickbank ID embedded in them over much greater areas of web real estate.

(I have seen people selling this report online, which they are allowed to do, but I personally feel they have misunderstood the concept of viral marketing. Having said to that, if they can earn an honest dollar selling my report, good luck to them).

Furthermore, although I made the report freely available without the need to opt-in, in order to get the re-branding rights, I asked people to opt-in to my list. My reasons for doing things this way are simple.

There is often a marked reluctance to opt-in to a list. Why should you when you know nothing about the person behind the form? I believe it would have reduced my potential audience quite significantly, which defeats the whole purpose of viral marketing. Make it easy, make it free and make it risk free. Once they have read through the report they should at least know a little more about me, should they care to :-)

Additionally, the biggest problem with giving people something for free is its perceived value. I know from past experience that a percentage of people who download a free report will take no action whatsoever. Others will actually read it, understand the benefits, and decide to rebrand it and promote it. Those are the people I would rather have on my list, the ones who have demonstrated the fact that they are willing to market things and try and improve their success rates by actually doing something for themselves.

Harsh? The internet marketing arena is full of tyre kickers and freebie seekers and they will invariably never change. I honestly think that a combination of laziness and cynicism affects many people who say they want to make money online but are prepared to invest nothing in trying to improve their chances of doing so. As a result they never succeed at anything and the cynicism just gets deeper. It's easier to blame anything or anyone other than themselves. Consequently, you are unlikely to ever make money by marketing to this group either.

Getting back on track however, you can see how the author of a viral report or ebook benefits. Once the book is out there and being passed around from person to person it acts as a salesperson and branding device. After the initial work, you will need to promote your viral marketing vehicle, but you will often find that the snowball effect soon means that you don't have to keep doing so. The viral effect goes on working for you 24/7. Every copy that is out there has the potential to bring you traffic too, because although the book is rebrandable there is one other important factor to mention.

Never make all the links rebrandable in your report. You need to keep some links for yourself. Think of it as a bonus for doing all the initial work and putting your idea out there. Links back to your own sites for example, maybe one or two affiliate links you specifically want to promote.

I hope that you can now see the potential of viral marketing using ebooks. They can bring you traffic and commissions for a long time after you have made them, and that is why they are so popular.

Good viral ebooks are an unselfish way to help others and yet help yourself too. Share your knowledge and show people how to duplicate what you are doing, and, give them the tools to do it themselves.

It's not hard to do, it just takes an idea and a little bit of application. I think that is worth it for the potential rewards.

You can write viral ebooks an almost any subject, it doesn't have to be in the IM or affiliate marketing niche. Just provide some good information, make it easy for people to pass on and offer them some solid reasons for doing so.