A Viral Marketing Glossary

Viral marketing is the concept of doing something once that will spread like a virus (hence the name), and having it produce for months or years.  Classic versions of viral marketing are buzz generation and word-of-mouth advertising.

On the Internet, you make an electronic publication of some sort, such as an article, video, audio, or PDF file.  You then put it into circulation and it gets copied over and over again.  Each copy puts what you want (usually links or the URL for it) in front of someone else.  The result is that over time, you get more and more of what you're seeking (page rank, money, credibility, or all of the above!) from a single action taken, which may not even cost you much at all.

Viral marketing has its own terms like anything else, and instead of making you run around the Net finding them, I'll list them here.

Article Marketing:  This is the concept of writing an article with a resource box and putting on a free article site to be used as content by other sites.  Those sites must keep the resource box in consideration for its use, and you can use this to build traffic and page rank for your site.  Examples of free articles sites are GoArticles.com, ArticleRich.com, and EzineArticles.com.

Buzz:  Excitement about a product, service, or site that generates word-of-mouth recommendations, sales, or free traffic.

Copyright:  A filed legal right on a work that gives you exclusive rights to reproduce, perform, and distribute it.  You need this in order to issue those rights to someone else and still have recourse if they try to rip you off.

PDF file:  Portable Document Format file.  This is the foundation of viral report and ebook generation.  If you're creating something for Internet based sale or distribution, this is what you're making.  These can be read by programs like Adobe Acrobat.

PDF file maker:  This is a piece of software that can make PDF files from other types of files, like text and HTML files.  Adobe also has a service that will allow unlimited PDF generation for a monthly fee.

Rebrandable:  The capacity of a person who may want to distribute or sell your work to electronically 'personalize' it.  A program that creates and enables rebrandability is referred to as a rebrander.  This makes your products more attractive to distribution and gives it a better chance of being picked up and sold/given away.

Resale rights:  These are the rights you give a person to sell your work and keep all the money.  This is only useful when you have some form of back-end sales theory at work in your product, like traffic generation to a commercial site or affiliate links.  This form of right also comes in the master resale rights version, which means anyone who sells your ebook may also give the buyer resale rights too.

Viral Report:  A report of roughly 7-15 pages length, designed to be given away for free to distribute your links.  People looking to sweeten opt-ins or product deals can use these types of reports to do it and will distribute it for you in this way if its worthwhile.

Viral EBook:  A full-sized version of the viral report, usually issued with resale rights so the people distributing it can make money.  These ebooks contain site links, affiliate links, or both.  You must take the time and effort to make a saleable product to do this effectively, but a viral ebook can prove profitable in the long run.

These will get you started with your viral marketing understanding.