The goal of viral marketing is to spur activity and communication among prospects and your customer base. Your consumers propagate traffic to your site by the Internet's version of word of mouth. Let's not also forget that the traditional "word of mouth" viral marketing works just as well to promote your online business. Effective viral marketing involves time-tested marketing that requires your marketing tools have a strong emotional attraction.

This strong emotional attraction is best accomplished by employing two basic methods of sales. The first is providing solution oriented materials to use as your marketing tools. Basically, the potential consumer, no matter what your product or service has the question, "What will it do for me? All viral marketing materials should concentrate on providing positive solutions or answers to this question.

The other sales method that is crucial in any viral marketing campaign is the long-accepted fact that all purchases are made first based on emotions. Next, the consumer rationalizes this purchase with logic. Thus, the best viral marketing tools will first concentrate on the emotional aspect of the sales procedure.

To accomplish this you must paint the picture of the results or solutions your products or services provides. You must be able to have the potential customer engage in actually feeling the benefits. Visualization plays a very important part of the sales process. Even if only words are used, such as a viral marketing e-book, or e-zine, those words must paint the picture of the desired results.

To best accomplish this you must research your target market well. You must be able to identify which emotions are the major parts of closing the sale. Some common emotions that frequently evoke a purchase are: Fear, greed, vanity, lust, pride, envy, and laziness. These are very important feelings and desires often contributing to closing the sale. Your goal with the viral marketing is to create a verbal picture that teases and evokes the desires fueled by these emotions.

It is important to keep these two important aspects of closing a sale spread throughout every piece of your viral marketing materials. Don't quickly just slap something together and offer it free through search engines, directories, e-mails, newsletters or your site. Evaluate carefully to make sure your material is solution oriented and taps two or more of the most frequent emotions that evoke a sale. Without these two steps at best your viral marketing efforts will get minimal results.

About the author:

Ryan Smith is the owner of http://www.mustviewads.com/ and founder of Promotion Academy, which offers written lessons, videos, and other resources. Find out more at http://www.PromotionAcademy.com