Viral marketing is one of the most efficient marketing innovations online. The term was coined after the idea of information spreading quickly. Viral marketing strategies usually come in the form of images, video clips, e-books, text messaging, and e-mail. Viral marketing is a great word-of-mouth way to promote a business that can snowball and take on a life of its own. It works especially well if your information uncovers a problem and your web site solves the problem.

Viral marketing often can have better results than other forms of marketing. Traditional advertising is recognized for what it is, biased information intended to influence our purchasing. I am often surprised how many people I talk to misunderstand the basics of how viral marketing works. Viral marketing tools are easy to develop.

Viral marketing is effective for small as well as medium sized businesses. Using the viral marketing strategies, you can market your business and achieve all your objectives including boosting sales, increasing search engine rankings and increasing targeted traffic. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on individuals rather than payed for campaigns to pass along a message to others. The speed of the internet advances the effectiveness of viral marketing efforts.

One of the best methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. You have the product, a Joint Venture partner has his customer list of thousands and his marketing skills. Joint Ventures benefit both parties involved with a split of the profits and work.

Another form of the viral marketing secrets is to set up an affiliate program with individuals promoting your product. The affiliate will get paid a percentage of each individual sale made by them. Affiliate marketers are always looking for new products to promote, that is what they do.

Viral marketing secrets is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can apply. Using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is a another way of getting your product or service out to the public. You set up a site, get all of your information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.

Just adding anyone to your profile isn’t going to do any good because they are likely looking to connect with friends and wont be interested in your product. The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find people interested in your products. If you are a writer marketing a new book adding other writers isnt going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre will help.

Another of the viral marketing secrets is to send out chain letters with information about your products in a story that gets people to continue resending the letter to their friends.

Viral marketing secrets are best described as the modern form of word-of-mouth marketing. It delivers exponential growth to websites by generating sales through its own existing customer base.

Metrics/Tracking: How to measure effectiveness

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.

Strategic Tagging

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.

Releasing all videos simultaneously

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.

Commenting: A conversation with yourself

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.