What do I mean by viral? Sites that take a life of their own, that grow completely by the input of your visitors.

I’m beginning work on a niche site project that will launch this summer. Perhaps I’ll fill everyone here in on the URL (not sure yet!)

Here’s what I’m aiming to accomplish virally with this site:

• Content - Through forums and article submissions, I want the vast majority of the site’s content to be created by the visitors. It will be essential to have a system in place for users to login, contribute the content, and allow me to approve it.

• Traffic - Search engine traffic is great (free & paid), but I expect the BULK of this site’s traffic to be repeating visitors. Makes for a more stable traffic source.

• Links - Every member will get a “profile” (no, this isn’t some dating site) that they’ll be encouraged to link to in their signature files on related niche forums they frequent. This will help build the link popularity of this site automatically. The most popular sites are ones where the links come freely with no need for link exchanges, article submissions, paid links, etc.

That’s it in a nutshell.

For any site you’re launching from now on, think how you can incorporate the above three viral factors and you’ll be off to a running start!