Making Promotional Videos Viral on Youtube

This weekend a video was posted on YouTube that discusses the methods of making a video viral on YouTube. The strategies come from a viral video agency that has written a number of controversial articles about their success in-market. The video does really well to summarize the overall strategies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EQ5HYPz1w

On top of that, certain “jump-points” were listed as how they get the initial viewers that will lead to the viral explosion:

Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.

Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.

Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.

Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.

Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

[bullets supplied by TechCrunch article found here]