Video Marketing: Making Viral Videos
Making viral videos is something that every video marketer strives to achieve with their creations.
You have probably watched YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views and wondered how you could replicate this feat and attach your marketing message to it.
Well it can be done, but somebody must work awfully hard and spend a great deal of time to make it happen.
When people first think about making viral videos, they think about videos like the ‘Miss Teen South Carolina‘ or the ‘Soulja Boy video‘ that have millions of YouTube views. It’s important to understand that not all videos go viral organically.
For promotional and marketing purposes, you can consider a video as being “viral” if it has at least 100,000 viewers in a specific niche market.
Because of the huge amount of videos that are being uploaded to YouTube and the other video sharing sites on a daily basis (well over 60,000); making viral videos organically becomes a less likely option. However, there are techniques you can use to promote your video and increase the likelihood that it does goes viral.
First of all, if you are making viral videos that millions of people will want to watch and share it with others, Content Is The Key.
However, if you follow these marketing strategies for making viral videos, content is not necessary the primary ingredient to successfully get over 100,000 views:
- Design your video for remixing.
Create your video simple enough so that others can remix it over and over again.
- Make your video short.
A 10 to 30 second video is the ideal length for making viral videos. You can break down longer videos into bite sized clips and “parts”.
- Never make your video into a blatant advertisement.
Viewers will not share a video if it feels like an outright advertisement unless it is really outstanding, like the “Sony Bravia” video.
- Make your video shocking.
Give your viewer a “shock factor” so they investigate it farther and pass it along to their friends.
- Use fabulous headlines for your video.
Spend a lot of time creating a headline for your video that not only grabs your viewer’s attention, but also causes them to step back with “shock and awe”. Make them “not believe” the headline enough to view your video.
- Sex sells, so use it if everything else fails.
Go to a modeling agency or the local gentleman’s club and hire the most attractive girl you can find to appear in your video.
Look to the “Obama Girl” as an example.
- The next step in making viral videos, is to get your video into the ‘Most Viewed’ page.
Almost 90 million videos are watched every day on YouTube alone and most of these are selected by viewers who go to the “videos” tab at the top of the page.
Once you get your video on the Daily Most Viewed videos page; your video will no longer be lost in the over 10,000 new videos that are uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis.
It will be one of the twenty videos highlighted on the Most Viewed page, which means that you have a 5% chance of grabbing a click on that page.
To get the first 50,000 views you need to get your video listed on this page; you need to do some basic marketing:
- Forums can be used to start new threads and embed your videos.
- Bloggers can be contacted to get your videos embedded on their blogs if they are relevant. Offer to guest blog or just pay them to embed your video.
- Facebook is a great place to share videos with your friends. Post your video on Facebook Video and link back to your YouTube video.
- MySpace can be used to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of users MySpace pages if they allow you to, and most of them will.
- Send links to your videos to your email list. This can be a very effective strategy if your recipients are willing to receive video links from you.You can also share your videos with your universe of friends and ask them to email it to all of their friends. When done properly, this can be a very effective way to spread the buzz about your videos and get them to the “most viewed” page.
YouTube’s “Daily Most Viewed” videos are only up there for about 48 hours before they are moved to the “Weekly Most Viewed” list, so once the video is video is on the Most Viewed page, there are some things you can do to keep it there awhile.
Create a compelling optimized video thumbnail or two that showcases one of the models you hired, preferably in some revealing attire or maybe nothing at all.
This is the best way to maximize the amount of clicks you will receive.
It’s also a good idea to create two or three thumbnails and rotate them every few hours, to present “fresh” content to new visitors. Make sure your thumbnails are clear and present face shots if possible. Remember that you are competing with 19 other videos on the page for clicks, so do it right.
Making viral videos occasionally requires some sneaky tactics, like changing the optimized title of your video several times in order to get more people to click on it.
People go for catchy and sometimes misleading titles like “Newly Leaked Video Of …..” or ” A Secret Behind The Scenes Look At …..”.
In addition to the above strategies, you can take advantage of Search Engine Optimization by strategically Tagging your videos with keywords specific to your market niche, cross Commenting on your videos to generate viewer buzz, and using any other idea that will get people to click on your videos and pass them on to their friends.
Making viral videos these days requires some serious creativity, a bit of luck, and a lot of hard work, but the results are well worth your efforts.