Viral marketing is called that because if it is successful, it could easily spread like a virus. This is a good way to place your brand where you want your probable costumers to see them. Plus, you do not have to spend millions of dollars to have a successful viral marketing campaign as part of your social media marketing. With the widespread use of the Internet, more people can watch a good viral marketing campaign than an ad shown during the Super Bowl.

There is no quick recipe you can follow though to make your advertising campaign to go viral. Sometimes, even the most planned advertising stunts do pan out so well while some hastily made videos shared on YouTube could reach millions of views in a matter of days. Although there’s no recipe for success in viral marketing, you can follow some quick tips to make sure that your viral marketing campaign would not be a big flop.
First of all, be sure that what you are promoting is a good one. Your marketing campaign might get a lot of attention from people but it would be useless if the first hundred customers or so come out with negative reviews of your product or services.

Another thing that you have to look into is your site’s resources. If all goes according to plan and your marketing campaign becomes a viral hit, your site would receive thousands of visitors. If your hosting account only has limited bandwidth allocation, your site could go down which is never a good thing especially during that time span when your viral marketing campaign is at its peak or is about to peak. If that happens, you could end up losing a lot of potential customers.

Remember that the chance of making it big with just one shot at viral marketing might not be enough so try and try again if you fail. And don’t forget about search engine optimization since that is one long-term solution to ensuring your brand’s popularity on the Internet.

If you’re about to promote your video, find existing videos in youtube similar to your niche which already has tons of views or those uploaded by users who are really getting good traffic via their uploaded videos, then copy their tags to the video you’re uploading.

The logic is that whenever their video is watched, your video will appear in their related videos in the sidebar which will give you lot more possible views.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXODTDZAyxQ&autoload=1 400 350]

Now that’s what we call VIRAL

See you on SEMCON 2007 Benj!