All you ever wanted to know on how to make your YouTube videos viral! That’s the promise of Techcrunch’s guest post
The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos.

And secret they are indeed. For sure, if I was using those strategies I would keep them secret too.

Here is a florilege (French word for anthology, but I love the sound of it in French) of the comments that bloomed rapidly after it was posted: unethical, wrong, dishonorable, immoral, debauched, degenerate, degraded, dissipated, dissolute, libertine, profligate, riotous, disgraceful, scandalous, shameful, shocking, scrofulous. To be honest all those adjectives were under one comment, but it reflects the spirit of many of the comments. To be strictly honest, this comment also added another adjective: ingenious, which reflects the spirit of a tiny minority of the comments.

Now that I’ve described the controversy, let’s examine more closely what it actually says. It says a lot of other things too (I encourage you to read the whole article, it is very instructive), but the following contains the most juicy parts.

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, 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. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our 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.

To summarize: pay, fake, and spam. Nothing glamorous here. Unlike the commenter aforementioned, I don’t find it ingenious either. This is what marketers are doing since marketing exists! And why are they doing this? Well, because it works. This is a sad truth, but a truth nevertheless.

Surely, you can question the ethics, but there will always be a need for people who get the job done.

Whatever you think of the guy’s ethics, I think he deserves respect for being so open, and even if you are not using any of those techniques it is always interesting to know how things actually work and hopefully this will inspire an honest reader who will be able toi use those rules in an ethical way.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.