The key to success for any business is advertising - you can create customers if people don’t know you exist or how you can meet their needs.  Although traditional advertising, such as print and broadcast media, has been around since the invention of the printing press and the birth of the radio and direct marketing could have been born with the Pony Express, the internet has cast a new light on marketing a business.

The cost of internet advertising may be cheap considering the number of potential customers it can reach, but for companies with a brick and mortar presence, advertising globally may not make sense.  For instance, if you have a located in New Zealand and your advertising appears in England or in Africa, the return on your advertising investment will not be realised.

Internet businesses can gain tremendously from internet marketing, however, it can get expensive over time and may not be as effective as it once was.  Nowadays, many people are being flooded by a barage of emails into their inboxes that they simply do not open emails that appear to be advertising in nature.  Even pop-up advertising windows are now viewed as a pestilence and internet surfers install programs to eliminate these.  Because so many people find pop-ups so annoying, sometimes they won’t buy from you even if it is something they need in an emergency. 

One of the best advertising for your business depends on having others send your advertising message to their friends on their own accord.  Such advertising will have a greater impact because it is given without being asked for and the recipients, who received them from trusted friends will not complain about it.  Offline, this is referred to as “word-of-mouth” advertising.  Online, it is known as “viral marketing”. 

The use of viral marketing has been growing fairly rapidly over the past year.  It involves having internet users distribute your advertising message of their own free will.  One example of the first and most successful uses of viral marketing was when companies started offering free email accounts.  A brief advertising message would appear at the bottom of every email sent, usually including a link for the advertiser and whenever people signed up for the free email service, every email they sent out also contained the message and link.

This resulted in advertising being sent out by the user of the free email, every time they sent correspondence. Viral marketing of this type is typically either extremely cheap or free, with the email company receiving a percentage of any sales made simply by having this message included in emails.  The sales were based on the recipients’ clicking on the link in the email, and although the number of clicks was relatively small, the percentage based on the number of emails sent grew larger and larger as more people took advantage of the free email offers.  The commission from the sales generated quickly paid for the hosting the email service.

Finding a product on which to place your advertising that be given out free, and which in turn will be handed to others by the original recipient can be an easy means of reaching more people with a smaller investment.