Email is one of the best ways to spread your marketing message. It's fast, cheap and, most important of all, it can be viral. Have you ever sent a message to your friends, maybe a joke or a story, only to have it sent back to you days later with several other email addresses in the CC field that you don't recognize? That's because your friends have sent it to their friends, and those friends in turn have sent it to their friends and so on. The email chain is often endless.
Email is an ideal mechanism for viral marketing, because a message can be spread to multiple recipients almost instantly.

Email allows us to touch people at any time and in any place. Email enables a whole new dimension of branding by allowing our brands to be directly connected to the times and places in which we deliver them. Because we can touch people more precisely, we can
brand ourselves more accurately as well.

Email that you send to your customers and friends, if interesting or useful, could again be forwarded by your customers and friends to their own customers and friends.
A good illustration of viral marketing through emails is through ezines and newsletters. The term ezines is coined for publications sent through email. These publications could be anything such as articles related to your business, press releases for a new service offered by you or any other write-up inviting people to visit your website.

Email Newsletters or Ezines
We had a whole chapter on newsletters already in this book. However, what we didn’t discuss then is that newsletters can be a great viral marketing tool. If your newsletter contains information of value, such as tips, hints, news or tutorials, you'll find that subscribers will forward it on to others, and that’s viral marketing at it’s best.

The use of newsletters can also help build content for your website which increases search engine visibility. Another great benefit is that your newsletters, ezines or ebooks will proliferate links on many sites that point back to your site. Several leading search engines,
including Afqam, use page-ranking algorithms that measure how many links point to your site and rank your page in search findings accordingly. The way to do it would be to encourage your readers to upload your material on their sites.

However, you must remember that a newsletter should contain valuable information, not just sales copy, otherwise interest will quickly drop off and you'll be getting a number of unsubscribe requests. Worse still, your ezine will be deleted as soon as it arrives,
leaving you with a valueless list that only sucks up your time, resources and bandwidth.

Tips for Writing Articles that are Viral
Pick a topic that you know something about and then go to the search engines and find as many websites as you can that deal with that subject. As well as collecting information for your article, make a note of any URLs that offer free resources dealing with the topic of
your article. Include those URLs in your article.
You should choose a topic very carefully. Once the topic is selected, doing enough research on the subject is vital. Organize the material and write in an interesting style. Make sure that you provide links to free resources.

The content in your article should not be pure sales copy. There has to be valuable and genuine information. Promotion of your product or service should be subtle. Viral marketing using articles is much different than running an email marketing campaign that blasts millions of mail messages to unsuspecting readers. At the end of your article, attach a 5 or 6-line “About the Author” box that includes your site URL or autoresponder subscription address.

When you have finished your article, do NOT send it out straight away. Hold onto it for 2 or 3 days and then come back and read it again. You'll be amazed at the improvements you can make. Those final improvements are what make the difference between an article that gets published and one that doesn't. Once you are satisfied with your article, send it to your own ezine list, publish it on your blog and encourage your subscribers to publish your article on their sites.

Additionally, you can use article distribution services such as SubmitYourArticle.com, IdeaMarketers.com and ThePhantomWriters.com to increase the reach of your article and possibly get it published on hundreds of other websites. Plus, once it’s online as a “free reprint” article, you’ll find that many new webmasters will find your article on someone else’s site and re-publish it on their own site including your resource box. This is an extremely powerful form of viral marketing. You are providing valuable content which other websites want and need which in turn motivates those webmasters to publish your article and spread your marketing message via your article’s “About the Author” resource box.