Viral marketing is the well-known name for pass-it-along marketing, better known in the form of word-of-mouth marketing such as referrals.  So can this form of marketing really work in a niche?  Absolutely.

Although there are some forms of marketing that are not so well-suited for niche marketers, viral marketing is not among them.
Viral marketing may be one of your most effective marketing tools if you’re a niche marketer.  You may be wondering now why I would say that.  Let’s examine it for a moment.

Niche marketing is usually most successful when you find the least-served sub-market.  For instance, say you’re interested in marketing art supplies, something you know a good deal about.

Well, that’s a pretty broad market.  You’ll want to look at smaller, less-served groups within that market.  So you narrow it down to calligraphy supplies, a much less-served market.

And, as is a well known fact, people with common interests tend to like to network, share ideas, information and connections.  This is where viral marketing can be very effective in niche marketing.

Here’s how it works.  You set up your website and start driving traffic to it.  Then you put together update mailings, a newsletter or other such mailings and offer an area for people to sign up for them.

When you send these out you include a great offer such as a freebie or attractive discount along with an invitation for people to pass them along to their friends, knowing that most of the people who have visited your website will know at least one other person who would be interested in your products.

Viral marketing is a great, nearly free method of advertising.

As with any marketing method you’ll want to track the results of your campaign to see which offers are responded to the most and which ones your recipients may want to see, or see more of, which you can do by providing a method for them to send you feedback and ideas.

Let’s take a few minutes to go over my favorite methods of driving traffic.

1. An easy-to-find website will have more traffic than others.  Making your site easy to find starts with the use of keywords used in search engines.

Ask your webmaster to use keywords that you have provided for your site to "name" each page of your website.  This will increase the occurrence of your site coming up in searches.

2. Viral marketing is another of my personal favorite ways to drive traffic to your site.  While you may believe that this is too difficult an undertaking for you if you’re a relatively new marketer, that is not true.

You can start a viral marketing campaign that’s on a fairly small scale by simply using mailings with an attractive offer to customers on your mailing list.

Be sure to include an invitation for them to pass it along to friends and you should see a noticeable increase in traffic in a fairly short amount of time.

3. My third favorite method of driving traffic to your site is by placing a "recommend this site" area on your website.

This makes it very easy and very tempting for your visitors to recommend your site to people they know.

As you can see by these three examples there are fairly easy methods available for driving traffic to your site.

These methods have been used by scores of marketers with a great deal of success and, if done correctly, should prove to be equally successful for you, too.

Not only do you have basically free access to hundreds, thousands, or more e-mail addresses that people give to you when they visit your site and sign up for offers such as website updates or newsletters, but they can be purchased relatively inexpensively from a variety of reputable sources.

You can make money from your mailing list in many different ways. However, simply having a mailing list with a large number of e-mail addresses on it is no guarantee that you’ll see a profit from it.

The key factor in making a profit from your mailing list is to use it as a tool; a tool that drives traffic to your website and encourages visitors to purchase.

So, how do you make all this happen?  First you need a plan in place to constantly add new e-mail addresses to your mailing list. To do this you must have an adequate flow of traffic to your website.

The best way to do this is to have regular mailings such as a newsletter, weekly update mailings or other such mailings going out.

You’ll want to ensure that these mailings include an invitation to the recipient to pass them along to others, too.

To ensure that people will want to pass along the mailings you should include enticing offers such as freebies, coupons and other such offers that will be difficult for people to resist sharing.

Make sure to track which offers get the highest response and offer them frequently, but not so often as for them to get boring.

You may also want to provide recipients with a way of offering their feedback on the offers they enjoy and ones they would like to see.

Other methods of making money from your mailing list are becoming quite popular these days.  Many Internet Marketers and business people with large, well-established mailing lists have begun renting, selling and even swapping mailing lists.

This may be something you would like to consider, however there you should keep in mind that there are rules and regulations that must be adhered to when doing business of this nature.

As you can see the ways to make money from your mailing list are neither complex nor terribly time-consuming. The profits you will reap from an ever-growing mailing list of happy, loyal customers will surely be an adequate reward for your efforts.