Internet and Businesses Articles

Once you have a viral video to share as a part of your viral marketing strategy, it's up to you to find the right places to post it so that others will watch it share it and act in some meaningful way on your message - be that sharing the video, or visiting your website.

Some techniques have been found to be more effective than others. Those that you will want to apply to your own viral marketing to generate the most traffic with interest in posting on their own include:

1. Video clips that generate click-throughs and ultimately lead to subscriptions - videos posted on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, vSocial, and Grouper allow you to include a description with a link on the same page as the video itself. This brings targeted traffic back to your main website. The results are most successful with comedic or informative videos that have charisma. The videos should never be promotional in nature, because nobody viewing them will want to be sold to. In fact, they shouldn't even include product placement or some witty way to tie in a product or sales pitch at the end. Instead, it should have appeal in itself, and be related to the topic or industry of your website, so that there will still be drive to visit your website once the viewer has finished watching the video.

2. Video clips that work as a part of an overall optimization strategy - done right, you can generate traffic consisting of tens to hundreds of thousands of viewers for your viral video. The majority of this will occur through social networks online. People don't typically share videos with their business contacts, but will instead spread the word among the people they socialize with. This being said, by simply posting on a site such as YouTube, you'll be reaching only a fraction of the traffic that could be exposed to your message. Therefore, you should incorporate your video into an overall optimization strategy just as you would with your website or blog for the search engines, so that they can be located within social network sites. Similar to search engine optimization (SEO), this process is referred to as social media optimization (SMO). This makes you much more visible within online communities and other online social scenes (for example, MySpace, FaceBook, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Reddit. This greatly increases your odds of having the video shared.

Certainly, there is no strict formula for creating an ideal viral video that has perfect SMO, however, by applying these concepts, you will greatly increase your traffic and your word-of-mouth advertising.

Mark Lewis is the owner of KMS Productions and webmaster at http://www.famousbymorning.com A site for quality online videos that value the essence of the story...and loves a challenge!