Make sure to tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

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YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? Choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags, but more unique tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

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Once people are watching a video, how do you keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

Most of the time bloggers/vloggers will say: “We’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If you have multiple videos, you should post all of them at once. If someone sees the first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would they make them wait until we post the next one? You should give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. You don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

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Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. You get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Don’t be afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, you could just delete their comment. You can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

A heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

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If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with 19 other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As you edit our videos, make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

When you feel particularly creative, you optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

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Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.” With this method, you can definitely generate views since many users randomly click videos just based on the title.

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Now that your video is ready to go, how the video going to attract viewers?

The core concept of video marketing is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that "Videos" page, which lists the "Daily Most Viewed" videos.

So how do you get the first 50,000 views needed to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs : Reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and pay to post our embedded videos or work out some sort of agreement with them. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums : Start new threads and embed the videos.  if we get enough people working on generating posts and threads, 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.
• Facebook : Share, share, share. Sharing a video with your 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.

Each video has a shelf life before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

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If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. A video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. A concept should not be forced because it fits a brand, but should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines to follow:

• Make it short : 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing : create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others.
• Don’t make an outright ad : if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing.
• Make it shocking : give a viewer no choice but to investigate further.
• Use fake headlines : make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!”
• Appeal to sex : if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video.

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
• Dude

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There are thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day. No matter how “viral” you think your video is no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it with no promotion. Not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to achieving viral success.

There are several startups that you can hire to help your videos go viral, but do you want to pay for your video to have this effect? Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to creating a viral video.The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Whether you create 4-5 videos that get 100,000 to 1 million views or 80-90 videos that get 1,000 to 10,000 views each, getting your video to become viral takes time.

Hollywood movie studios create a series of viral clips in advance of a blockbuster movie coming out. The thing is that movie studios have an advantage because TV shows, websites, and even word of mouth help these clips go viral. When you, an individual creating your video from your home, try to make a video go viral you don’t get that advantage. Plus movie studios invest a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, someone is promoting it for them.

Did you ever take these points into account? Ever wonder if some of the viral videos you’ve seen were actually created by someone other than who the person on promotes the video on Youtube or other social video sites?

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1. The keyword for the success of any online marketing video is "submitting". The best choices are video hosting sites like YouTube , Yahoo! Videos , or Google Videos . The main advantages are that your videos will be hosted for free and they will not take up any of your site’s bandwidth.
2. Share your videos. If you really want to make yourself known, allow users to be able to link to your videos. Viral marketing videos are the best way to make companies (and, subsequently, their products/services) known across quite vast Internet user communities. They carry a company’s name across the Web at far greater speeds than any other marketing tool in existence.
3. Don’t forget to add such phrases as "Tell a friend" or "Visit our Web site" at the end of your video.

Use online marketing video to supplement the "traditional" TV ad campaign. Online and broadcast go hand in hand, they don’t exclude one another. Online marketing videos give you the opportunity to communicate important messages to people more accurately and efficiently than ever. Use videos to differentiate your business from your competitors, to make yourself known and stand out of the crowd.

The Internet marketing videos must be short enough no to get Web users bored and drive them away from your site. Video ads on the Web must be significantly shorter than those usually seen on TV. Web users don’t like to waste time, and they are fed up with never-ending ads.

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