Are you looking for a way to make the private label articles that you bought do even more work for you? Here's a suggestion for a new way to use those articles in a tool that can increase your market share exponentially. It's called viral marketing, and it works on the principle that people enjoy sharing good information and products with each other.

Viral marketing is a relatively new concept in sales that can be used with private label articles. The idea is that, like a virus, one site or individual can "catch" it from another. It's the ultimate in word-of-mouth sales, and consists of six simple principles:

First, it gives products or services away. It's usually pretty easy to give away things, no strings attached. The hitch is that this item you're giving away is going to encourage people to spend money with you. For instance, if you are a massage therapist, gather up those private label articles you bought on alternative health and relaxation techniques and compile them into an ebook. At the end of the book, or on each of your private label articles, include your contact information in some way that it can't be deleted from the main book – for example, you could save your book in PDF format. You might even go so far as to put your email address on the bottom or inside margin of each page.

Second, it is easy to transmit to other people. Electronic documents are particularly good for this principle because you can duplicate them an infinite amount of times and email them or transfer files to anyone who can receive them – and every ebook that you give away makes the sets of private label articles that you purchased even more of a bargain – you pay for your source once, and then pass it on, and on and on.. What's more – an ebook of your private label articles is easy for your customers to copy and pass on to friends.

Third, it's very scalable. Again, electronic documents are ideal. Back to the massage therapist example, the therapist might think about giving away coupons for free ten-minute massages instead of an ebook. If he or she has an overwhelming response, there's no way they can make good on all those massages. However, with the ebook compilation of private label articles, he or she would be able to give away as many as were requested – instead of being distributed on a small scale, ebooks can be given away to an infinite number of customers, and a newsletter mailing list for articles is infinitely expandable.

Like a virus, viral marketing exploits everyday behaviors of people. When they find a great idea, people naturally want to share it with their friends. If they're offered something of value for free, they are more likely than not going to take advantage of it.

It utilizes existing transmission methods. Viral marketing may take advantage of the gossip chain or email, of the Internet download system or even of postal mail (though that can get expensive) to get more use out of those private label articles that you bought. Really, viral marketing uses the same avenues of transmission as a chain letter – but it's not trying to sell anything or overtly get you to do anything. Instead, it's working on getting information about a person, a product, or a service out to the public.

And lastly, it takes advantages of resources that belong to other people. This does not make it a bad thing; rather, that's the single tradeoff for your free gift. If it's an ebook, your downloader is using his or her own computer memory to get it, or they may be using their own email resources to receive it from or email it to someone else.

As you can see, viral marketing is a powerful new concept. So how can you take advantage of that for your business?

Creating Viral Ebooks

If you have an existing body of published articles on your website, they should not be static; instead, you should use them as an active marketing tool. If you don't already have a body of articles that can be converted, you can buy an entire set of private label articles from a web content service – or even a fully completed ebook. To be worth downloading, though, it should at least the equivalent of 20 articles around one subject. Once you have a good collection, whether your own articles or articles purchased from a content service, compile them into a viral ebook that you can disseminate to your customers and anyone interested in your products or services.

Think about it: if your business centers around selling herbal products and natural foods, then a viral ebook of private label articles that tell consumers how to best implement nutritional supplements for weight loss could be an ideal marketing tool as well as a valuable source of information. If you sell Beanie Baby collectibles, a compilation of the articles you've written (or hired others to write) detailing the most valuable collectibles along with good-quality photographs will be valuable to your customers and might also encourage them to purchase some of the collectibles you're selling.

But viral ebooks extend beyond your own customer base. Hardly anyone's customers exist in a vacuum; most people have friends interested in the same things they like. With a viral ebook, you don't have to depend on someone emailing a link to your site to a friend; instead, they can email the ebook to their friends. And since the ebook includes your contact information and website with each and every article, you have instantly made a new customer contact, just from compiling your existing information into a more easily usable tool.