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How much would you pay for a system that would literally explode both your traffic and your backlinks? What if I said you could actually implement the system without spending a penny?

Viral marketing is about getting others to spread your message for you. It works on the same principal as pyramid spelling! For example, you tell two people about your offer, and those two people each tell another two people and so it goes on. You only spoke to two people, but within a very short space of time hundreds of people know about your offer!

We’d all like a marketing system that worked in that way wouldn’t we?

Usually for a piece of content or a product to go viral, one of two things needs to happen:

Your content or product needs to be so unique or funny that people see it and automatically feel the urge to tell their friends or list about it

Or

You need to provide an “incentive” for your visitors to tell others about it!

In the first scenario, where no incentive is required, you can expect the viral process to happen rapidly, in some cases thousands of visitors can be generated in hours.

In the second scenario, the manufactured traffic won’t come as fast, but never the less, it will come, and keep coming for a long time. Even with scenario two, your content needs to be good, and in particular your incentive that promotes the viral behaviour needs to be of real value!

Setting up an affiliate scheme for your product and then offering high commissions to the top players in your niche is one form of viral incentive. Another is to give away rebrandable ebooks and software. Another is to use a tell-a-friend script with the offer of a reward for people who “tell their friends”.

Now for the secret tactic that I promised you in the title, it’s a tactic I use and it works!

What about offering your visitor a free gift in return for a link on a page of their site? Sounds ok, but not that viral?

Well think about it for a moment. You get backlinks, and the backlinks improve your rankings. Improved rankings bring you more traffic. The additional traffic generates more backlinks, which lead to even better rankings and even more traffic!

Now do you see the viral potential? This is a little used viral tactic that can bring big results.

I’ve presented the viral tactic above in it’s simplest form. Even in this form it can be highly effective, but with a simple “tweak” it can bring an avalanche of traffic quickly in addition to the traffic that comes from the improved rankings. All you need is to think big, and think viral.

For the purpose of this article, I am going to go over what backlinks are and why they are important. Additionally, I will share a few methods with you in order to get backlinks to your site.

A backlink, in actual fact, provides a path to your site. If you think of it this way, search engines provide links to your site which you can click on when viewing the search results, backlinks are the same, the only difference being that these links are pointing from another website.

So one may say, based on this, that the more backlinks you have the better. This would seem rational, however, this is not totally true. If links are coming back to your site from poor quality sites and sites that are specifically set up to point links to various other sites, then these links will not be as productive.

The reason for this, again, is pretty logical. First, we want links to our site so that people will visit it. If your links are posted on what are called link farms, then these are just artificial sites set up by webmasters and as a result, you will not get any real human traffic.

Second, search engines use algorithms to determine the relevance of any given site. As part of the algorithm, they measure how many links are pointing to your site. This is why, in the past, webmasters got together to create link farms so as to artificially increase the number of links to their site.

Search engines quickly figured this out and immediately started to discount these links. Additionally, as mentioned, if you have links pointing from another site to your site that does not relate to your content, then these links are not as powerful.

With that said, backlinks are very important if they are positioned in the right places. Your links do not have to be exactly relevant; for example, a site on garden tools could have a link pointing back to your site on lawn care.

The more backlinks you have the better, simply because it gives your site more opportunities to receive traffic. Additionally, search engines like backlinks and will deem your site as more of an authority.

So how do you go about getting these links? First, the search engines prefer what they term as natural linking. This implies that no one has negotiated to share links with one another. When natural linking occurs, people like the content on the site and link to it without being requested to do so.

However, the challenge is that people have to see your site first to say they like it and furthermore, this process would take a long time unless you had some luck with viral content.

So to get links to your site, you can post comments on blogs and on forums. You can write articles and have links pointing back through article directories. Additionally, you can add your site to web directories. If your site is new, you can do a press release.

Finally, when a link points back to your site, it has what is known as an “anchor text”. This is basically the click portion of the link. This is very important as the search engines read this text so as to understand what your site is about. So you need to do keyword research and use the keyword that you want your site to appear on the top of the search results for.