The idea behind viral marketing is that if you can get the product up in multiple places on the web and in front of as many eyes as possible for as little money as possible, you are doing some really good marketing on a budget. Most of the companies behind this style of promotion are smaller businesses that just want to get the word out about their product but don’t have the money to hire a public relations firm or spend money on advertising.

One of the more effective methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. While you have the product, your JV partner may bring his customer content list of thousands and his marketing skills to the project. In most cases a JV will benefit both parties involved with an equal split of the profits and possibly the work.

Another form of getting your product, to race around the internet world, is to set up an affiliate program with 100s of individuals and business promoting your product. The difference between a JV and an affiliate, is the affiliate will only get paid a percentage of each individual sale personally made by them.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what is viral marketing, then you should realize that it is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can do.  First of all, using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace is a fairly ingenious way of getting your product or service out to the public. You can set up a site, get all of the relevant information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.

Theoretically, just adding whoever to your profile isn’t going to do you any good as they are likely looking to connect with friends and won’t be interested in your product.  The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find those with similar interests.  Say that you are a writer marketing a new book.  Adding other writers isn’t going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre, well, that’s a different story.

Some viral marketing ideas include sending out chain letters with information about your product buried within a story that urges people to continue resending the letter to all of their friends. This is a decent idea, but if you use the chain letter to try and collect money for something that doesn’t exist or run a scam for a business, then that is fraud and is a crime. You have to be careful and make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws.

Now that you have an answer to the question of what is viral marketing, you should also know that using viral marketing plans too much can cause some problems.  If people feel they are being slammed by the product, then you are going to find many of your potential clients turned off by your aggressiveness.

Just remember that you’re trying to get the word out and tell people about your idea without being too pushy and you should be just fine.

This might seem non-sensical at first. Afterall, the client is the one paying you, so shouldn’t they have complete control? The simple answer is no, and here’s why. Quite often, clients don’t know exactly what they want, and quite often, they have no idea what kind of time or effort goes into the services you provide.

This means that if you constantly defer to the client to ask them what they’d like over the course of your project, you may find yourself giving them choices that they don’t need to be making, and aren’t really necessarily capable of making. This can turn an otherwise simple project into a nightmare.

If you’re working on an hourly basis, then clients making changes left right and center might not be a big deal since the more changes they make, the more hours you’ll bill. However, if you’re working on a per project basis, then the fewer changes and alterations you have, the better. And this means that if you can keep as much control over the details of the project as possible, you’ll end up having to deal with far less revisions.

The reality is, if you defer to the client for input on every small detail, they’ll probably end up asking for things that might be outside the scope of the price you quoted or impossible due to time restrictions. However, had you just made those decisions yourself, you’d never have had to deal with that at all.

Always make sure that everything that you’re going to deliver and all details are worked out and carved in stone contractually before you start a project. If your client doesn’t know exactly what they want, then either have them think harder about their requirements, or make it very clear to them that further revisions or changes will be billed on top of the initial price.

Some clients will try to work you to death for the least amount of money possible, and these aren’t the kind of clients you want to deal with. Avoid that problem by making sure that any time a project isn’t clearly defined from the start, that the clients understand that either a) creative control is in your hands or b) that they have the option of asking for revisions, but they will be billed for any changes that require extra time or work.