The word viral marketing is tossed around right and left in internet marketing. Viral Marketing is a phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.

Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.

If you can get something to go viral on the internet with a link back to a site you are promoting you can write your own paycheck.

Article marketing is one method of viral marketing. There are thousands of websites, blogs and ezine publishers begging for content. To get your article into publisher's hands you will need to submit them to article directories, forums and newsgroup announcement lists.

There are hundreds of article directories that let you freely publish your articles to their sites. You can search of these directories using your favorite search engine. Some of the top directories include:

Ezine Articles
http://ezinearticles.com

Idea Marketers
http://ideamarketers.com

GoArticles
http://goarticles.com

What makes an article become a viral marketing tool?

Relevant information - information that is right on the pulse of what's going on in your niche. For instance Google is hot, hot, hot right now in internet marketing. There are thousands of internet marketing articles on how to earn from Google. If you are a smart internet marketer you find something linked to Google and grab on because everyone is selling it and everyone is buying it. If you can't think up new material on Google or don't have an original idea don't worry you can still participate. If you have recently purchased a Google related product write a review. People will appreciate the feedback. If it is a popular product there are people doing keyword searches for that specific product and possibly finding your review.

No matter what niche you are in find the hot topics and write new information about the topic or write a product review. The hotter the topic, the more people are looking for it. Publishers are going to be more willing to publish a hot topic item that is well written.

Your bio must be up to par and fit in with the theme of your article. Nothing would be worse than to write a killer viral marketing article and that is passed around like a hot potato only to get no traffic because of a bad byline.