| A Viral Traffic Generator is probably one of the easiest ways to get your website's hits up in a ridiculously short time. Everyone knows that traffic is the heart and soul of a website: it affects more than just the money you make, it also affects your ratings with search engines, and even gives you better ratings so that you can interact with other websites and your clients from a position of authority. Like a TV or radio station with high ratings and a large number of viewers, a website with high traffic ratings can bargain for higher prices with people when negotiating for advertisement space or placing links to other sites. And, just like a classic TV or radio media blitz, a Viral Marketing Tool is one of the fastest and most aggressive means of gaining traffic in a hurry. The basic way a Viral Marketing Tool works is that it is, as it's name implies, a harmless and purposeful computer virus. The only real purpose it has is to get you traffic - through any means necessary. There are many different kinds of viral marketing tools, ranging from the mild to the downright intrusive. You don't really need to worry about getting slammed though, because viral software is perfectly legal. The more aggressive types simply toe the line a bit, but still stay on the sunny side of legality. The milder forms of Viral Marketing software, for example, can be programmed like the classic e-mail spreading viruses, which detect all contacts on a person's list and mail copies of your advertisements to those other e-mail addresses. And just like a virus, this process is self-replicating. The only real difference between your program and a harmful virus is that the only attachment to the virus is your ad, nothing more. Other types of viral traffic generation software are a bit more pushy. There are, for example, ones which can rifle through a search engine's word count optimization settings and it's traffic counter, and "bombs" the search engine repeatedly so that you wind up getting more and more hits, jacking up your ratings as far as the search engine is concerned. For obvious reasons, this is frowned upon by most search engines, but a good viral marketing program will be difficult to detect and trace, leaving your hands looking clean. Then there are the really pushy ones; these range from self-replicating pop up ads and banners with forced links to your site that spread throughout the internet, jumping from site to site and clinging to every person that even remotely touches a site with the program running on it. For purposes of keeping a clean reputation, this isn't a very good idea, and can get you marked as "spam" by a lot of sites and email addresses. However, if your website's revenue is mainly generated by hits in the first place, it is one of the fastest ways to make a quick buck. Thankfully, even the most aggressive viral marketing softwares come with user-determined parameter settings, so you can tailor your little marketing virus to meet your specifications, like targeting only selected IP groups. Therefore you can, with a little imagination, make it work especially for whatever your website's about. This added touch keeps you in control of what might otherwise be an overly intrusive online marketing tool. |