When thinking about how to promote your site virally, first study your site… see how you could make it better.  Ask yourself, “If I ever visited this site, would I want to tell my friends about it?”  If that answer is no, do everything you can to make your site more usable and friendly.  Think about adding freebies, greeting cards, games, screen savers, or anything else that will get sent around easily.

After you fix your site from the inside, you need to start promoting it from the outside.  You should begin by sitting down with a pen and paper and brainstorm, exploring ideas.  During this time, think about nothing but marketing and write down everything that comes to your head… don’t edit anything or refine your ideas.  The goal should be to take everything in your brain and dump it onto that piece of paper.  Be creative - everybody’s marketing strategy is different, so the ideas you think of should be unique to your site.  Once you have a start, you can begin to expand and refine these ideas.

The definition of viral marketing is that you don’t do any of the marketing… people spread the word on their own.  You can start off by telling your friends about it, but if it’s not worth spreading, then the word will eventually die.  Remember… stuff gets viral if it’s worthy of telling a friend and it’s easy to tell a friend about.  To make something easily “spreadable”, this means that you will need to place “Tell a Friend” forms and social media bookmarking links in a visible spot.

So remember, the main work with viral marketing is in tweaking the site content and then in the initial marketing launch.  If your site is truly viral, it will spread itself and won’t even need your help!