It's fair to say that email is an ideal mechanism for viral marketing, because a message can be spread to multiple recipients almost instantly.

Email allows us to touch people at any time and in any place. Email enhances a whole dimension of branding by allowing our brands to be directly connected to the times and places in which we deliver them. Because we can touch people more precisely, we can brand ourselves more precisely as well.

Email that you send to your customers and friends, if interesting, would be again forwarded by your customers and friends to their own customers and friends.

A good illustration of viral marketing through Emails is through Ezines and newsletters. The term Ezines is coined for publications sent through Email. These publications could be anything - articles related to your website or business, press releases for a new service offered by you or any other write up inviting people to visit your website.

Email Newsletters or Ezines

We had a whole chapter on Newsletters. However, what we didn’t discuss then is that newsletters can be a great viral marketing tool. If your newsletter contains information of value, such as tips, hints, news or tutorials, you'll find that subscribers will forward it on to others.

The use of newsletters can also help build content for your web site which increases search engine visibility. Another great benefit is that your newsletters, or ezines or ebooks will proliferate links on many sites that point to your site. Several leading search engines, primarily Google use Page-ranking algorithms that measure how many links point to your site and rank your page in search findings accordingly. The way to do it would be to promote uploading of your material on your customers’ sites.

Most importantly, a newsletter should contain valuable information, not just sales copy - otherwise interest will quickly drop off and you'll be getting a number of unsubscribe requests. Worse still, your ezine will be deleted as soon as it arrives; leaving you with a valueless list that only sucks up your time, resources and bandwidth.

Ezine advertising is one of the most powerful ways to market and promote your products and or services. There are literally thousands of electronic newsletters on the Internet with millions of people who subscribe to them. Placing ads in online newsletters is an inexpensive way to reach your target market quickly -- especially when you compare it with other forms of advertising.

In 2002, ezine publishing took a quantum leap, as its status evolved from "amateur's hobby" into becoming the most powerful marketing tool for business online. Email newsletters have come of age, and increasingly, more ezines will take this route, as subscribers prefer them to drab, lack-luster text-only ezines. In the coming year we'll see more ezines published.

There are tens of thousands of Ezines being published every month, with a collective audience of millions. And the editors of most of those Ezines are all looking for quality content for their newsletters.

If you master this technique you can get your name and your website URL in front of 100,000 or even a million readers. Right now there's a shortage of good Ezine Articles. So, if you write well and you know how to do research on the Internet, there's a huge market waiting for you.

However, ezines and newsletters can go unnoticed easily. People get a lot of junk newsletters which they delete without looking at them. Subscribers would only subscribe to Ezines which are actually useful to them. Besides, it's very important to inform subscribers exactly what you will be doing with their details as the Internet is rampant with mailing lists being sold off by web masters. Savvy surfers are becoming more selective in what they'll subscribe to - they'll expect some sort of commitment that you won't be distributing, selling or renting their email addresses.

Tips for Creating an Ezine and Emails that are viral:

  Pick a topic that you know something about and then go to the Search Engines and find as many websites as you can that deal with that subject.

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