The Viral Video Phenomenon – Viral Marketing Tools

Before we get started on this its probably a good idea to explain what viral marketing is and what viral marketing tools are available for use by everyone.

For a URL to go viral what you are looking for is for other Internet users to promote your URL on your behalf with no additional effort from yourself at an exponential rate.

One example would be to give away an ebook offering free information on your subject of choice. Included in the ebook would be links back to your chosen URL and you would make it very clear that you are happy for your ebook to be passed on to others. In truth that is the objective, to get the ebook given away to as many people as possible and as quickly and easily as possible.

This could be for something as simple as building a list of subscribers to your site and clearly the more people that get the ebook , the more people that will also get your link back to your URL and will potentially visit your site and receive an invitation to subscribe.

One of the most potent viral marketing tools is the video medium, as has been clearly demonstrated by YouTube on numerous occasions. Any of the videos on YouTube can be taken and a link placed back to it on a 3rd party website or you can, as I have done below, embed the video into your own post just by cutting and pasting the embedding code which is available right next to the video being shown.

That is also a point worth noting, taking the link or embedding the code is a very simple and easy process, that is another key to taking something viral, make it difficult and people simply will not bother, so make it easy to use for any of the tools you decide to implement.

Not sure anyone can predict what is going to be a big viral hit on YouTube, the strangest videos seem to gain huge popularity and some of the clips on the compilation below have had more than 900 million hits. Have to admit I have found some of them highly amusing and it is fairly easy to see how humor will sell big time, everyone in the world likes a laugh once in a while. So if you can find a way of being very funny while at the same time being very informative then you are pretty sure to be onto a winning combination.

Another viral marketing tool I have discussed previously is the use of articles for article marketing. This is a method I have used extensively and has demonstrated just how effective it is at getting traffic and improving the page rank of the blogs used as targets for the articles. Submitting articles is much easier to manage with some bespoke article marketing software.

You have to remember that content is king, if the content you try and use is not useful, informative, funny or has some other appeal then your viral marketing tools simply will not work. In fact promote the wrong content and you could end up with the opposite affect to the desired one, people could be turned off and switch you off, metaphorically speaking.

So no matter how weird you think those videos are that went ballistic, then you just have to consider that to a lot of people they offered something, even if on occasions that was just a fascination of the bizarre.