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Despite their no-marketing policies on many of the boards there, many have found an effective way to market through Yahoo! Groups that doesn’t seem spammy.

They simply network. It’s a little more time-consuming than posting an Ad and moving on, but it has worked since the dawn of Commerce and works here in online channels too.

Since there are uncountable thousands of groups to choose from, you’re sure to find one on your niche topic to join and  participate in. The majority of Yahoo! Groups out there are open to any new members who simply confirm their email addresses. Once in, all you really have  to do to take advantage of all these prospects is to talk about your shared interest with them. Don’t tell everyone what you do up front unless you’ve found one of those rare few groups that are just for networking businesspeople. (Those will have hundreds of posts a day though, operating much like a Safelist. No one reads all of that stuff!)

There are some groups that let you just post your ads as long as you put some thought into it, not simply pasting a link and moving on. Other groups are more restrictive, it’s up to the group owners to set those preferences.

The problem with the less restrictive groups is of course that fewer people actually read the posts, so what you want is to find the happy medium boards, halfway between “all postings ok” and “restrictive.” Inside any group you would want to join, you will do best to try and answer the question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution.

In case this sounds familiar, it’s exactly like Forum marketing. Never sound spammy, offer help and advice, and only market when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com to get started. It’s a huge place but well worth the effort in any niche where people want to get familiar with other people before buying from them.

Wait! Get your mouse away from your virus  scan button; there is nothing wrong or involving mischievous software in Viral marketing.

In Internet Marketing terms, any type  of content that allows you to pass incentives along is referred to as “Viral.” In this book, there are a few Affiliate links that normally I alone would get some kind of referral  fee for if you were to click on them.

However, with the use of some special  software that allows PDFs to be “Re-brandable” (meaning others can make the affiliate links theirs instead of mine) I’m giving anyone who wants the ability to make some money and pass my work along for me.

For the launch of the eBook I won’t have to do very much. I’m going to tell my list, of course. I’m going to place it on my site and maybe send some traffic exchange or safelist traffic to that page. Mainly, however, I’m going to get a few JV partners to re-brand it and send it to their lists. That’s it; all my marketing will be complete.

Surely you’ve seen those ridiculous breakdowns that MLMs show you that go something like this:

“If you sign up just 3 people that all sign  up just 3 people each, for ten levels seep, you’ll get over 59,000+ referrals in your downline…”

Well, the fact is that no one can control other people that they aren’t even talking to, so all of those plans wind up generating only a few measly people in that person’s downline who make him a buck every other year.

With Viral Marketing, the game Is different. First of all I’m trying to do is get people to read my words, not send me money. That’s a big difference, as every time this post appears on a new person’s computer, you can think of that as a person “in my downline.”

I could get 250 MILLION people to read this blog if I take it to a few Gurus with big lists. Possibly more. Some of those guys have over 100,000 on their lists, and that’s only my FIRST level. I don’t have any limit on the number of levels that this can grow. In five or even ten years  from now, the book you’re reading today might still be spreading, passed on by a  new Affiliate marketer every day between now and then.

Actually, there are two limits to how many people will read this blog. The obvious one is the population of English Speakers on our planet with a computer.  (I guess it COULD be translated one day…)

The other is the amount of  time until the affiliate links I’ve presented in this document are no longer valid. Someday those companies will go out of business, or at least their affiliate programs will be removed. Either case should be a few years at least.
Until those happen, nothing can stop someone just like you from downloading my rebranding kit, making the links here YOUR links, and passing it along to make some easy cash. That means more readers for me, and more exposure to my website. It’s a real win-win.

Back to YOUR Viral strategy, your last hurdle is that in order to make PDFs viral (so everyone on any computer format can read them) the software will cost some money.

PDFs are trickier than other eBook forms, so I only know of two or three companies that have been able to figure it out. I used the most advanced one, ViralPDF, to make this eBook. The other two I found out there were more basic, which will either limit  the number of people who can  read the book, or will limit their incentives to pass it along. If you’ve got to pay, might as well do it right.

If you are alright with only the windows crowd opening your document, then there are several ways to make a Viral eBook  for free. It will be  published in .EXE  format however, so even some windows users won’t want to open an .EXE file that no one they know has vouched for personally… Too many computer viri get passed along that way, and some corporate networks automatically strip .exe files from email attachments without even asking!

If you don’t think that that will scare off your crowd, such as when you will only be offering it from your windows-user website as a direct download, then you can give the following great free Viral eBook software a try.

For more on this subject, see eBooks Marketing.

Thanks to YouTube.com, (#5 in Alexa currently) online Video is “in” right now in a major way.

All you need to do to grab some of this traffic is to make your own simple vide on your niche’s topic.

It doesn’t even have to be a music video or a well scripted video… Nor a budget video or heck, even an interesting video. Like everything else
Marketing, attaching the right Keywords to your video will get it found. And your video, much like an Article or a Podcast, you simply present a “Call Action” that gets them to click over to your website.

Even Better… With Camtasia and the new IM version of CamStudio, you can simply set the movie to automatically re-direct them to your website when it finished!

Videos can also be used on your site as content, which in fact is a great use for them… Video is the highest form of content on the web right now, as proven by YouTube. However, for our purpose here today, you should come to think making videos as the same thing as writing articles… Plus a little bit of a software learning curve.

Camtasia is still the best tool for making these desktop videos, but it costs shopping $299 for a single user license and doesn’t show any sign of coming down soon. For a no-frills version that will help windows users make the similar product without all the extra effects, there is the totally free “CamStudio, Internet Marketers Version.”

What should you make a movie about? Well, it almost doesn’t matter. But for the sake of producing good content that people will tell their friends about and he build you extra traffic, ask yourself what you can do on your desktop that people in your niche market might find useful.
Anything at all… I’m making one now about how to select keywords. If you’re in a math-oriented niche, whip out MS-Calc.exe and talk about your computation while using the calculator on screen. Artists? Surely you have a writing tablet on your PC… You can teach techniques for drawing while showing them in real time what the drawings are.

Videos made with screen-capture movies are easy to produce, and if you know your niche, simple to write. Perhaps one day our standards will all be higher, but if you’ve spent more than an hour YouTubing, then you’ll agree that the majority of the content out there is really low-end stuff. Hollywood directors need not apply.

So make your desktop videos, name them with a keyword, open a YouTube account and upload them, tagging them with all of your relevant keywords… The Traffic is already there and you could see hundreds or even thousands of people watching your film short before the morning!

There are already tons of smaller YouTube knock-offs popping up out there, so perhaps one of them will be focused on your niche. If not, then you can stick with YouTube alone until one does pop up.

How to find them is a good question, I’d use Google’s Video Search to Google our top five keyword phrases… Surely if there is one that focuses on your niche then their website would offer up a few of the resulting videos.