Viral marketing strategies can effectively generate traffic to your website by creating buzz-building campaigns that excite and energize your customer base. However, in order to most effectively execute a successful viral marketing project, it is important to build a significant understanding of your target audience to tap into their social and psychological network.

By creating articles or newsletters, for example, that resonate with your audience, you will encourage loyal customers to share useful information or unique advice with their family and friends. Indeed, viral marketing is one of most powerful forms of product support as it consists of unbiased recommendations from trusted sources.

Initiating a viral marketing campaign begins with development of unique and attractive content for your most loyal customers. While articles that pertain to product or service you are selling will help draw visitors to your site, creating resources that speak to your audience in a strategic fashion.

Once your marketing theme or ideas have been thoroughly cultivated, you can begin to build a viral marketing campaign around your most critical ideas. For example, post your articles on message boards or deliver special content directly to consumers. At end of each article, add a link to your website and encourage your readers to send along information to their friends. Your article, if delivered appropriately, will begin to make its way throughout web passing from friend to friend and deliver a core business message that brings dramatic business returns.

In essence, article writing will 'TurboCharge' your site!

Although it sounds more like a catch-phrase from a marketer's hype-fest, its most appropriate phrase to describe effect article writing will have on your web site. It perfectly sums up major benefits of article marketing.

Article writing will quickly:

* boost one-way links to your site * help you brand your name or site * help sell or pre-sell your products * bring in plenty of targeted traffic * give you and your site more creditability

The effects can sometimes be jarring...

One minute, your site is humming along at its regular pace, then suddenly, you check your web logs and your stats has doubled or even tripled. There is a massive flood of visitors coming to your site. Sometimes, it may only be one site which picks up your article and features it in their ezine, bringing in targeted visitors to your site. Other times, it may be many sites and ezines displaying your articles, causing a large influx of guests to your site.

All of above has happened to me!

First, some background, I had heard other marketers sing praises of article writing for so long I decided to do a test-run and see proof for myself. Writing over 30 articles since January of this year, I kept track of my results over this six month period - to view these articles and find out where some of them ended up, just google my name "TITUS HOSKINS".

Finding and researching material for articles was not a problem. Online forums, subscribers' questions, and my own marketing tasks were a great source of ideas. Compiling and writing original articles that would stand out from crowd was hard part.

Here are some pointers that I learned about article writing that may also help you:

Find Right Title - Choosing right title will make or break your article, keep it short and put main benefit of your article in your title, i.e. what will readers actually acquire from reading your article?

Keep Your Article Short and Concise - If you want your article to be pick up by ezines and placed on sites, keep it short (300-1200 Words) and to point. I find articles in 700 - 900 word range do very well, longer articles less so.

Do A Spell and Grammar Check - Use a spell-checker or WordPerfect to check your articles. I also use Google as my proof reader. Not sure of a word or phrase, just Google it!