A "viral video" is simply a video that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing. There are no silver bullets to ensure your marketing videos "go viral", but there are definitely a few golden rules.  Here they are.

Target Audience – Think carefully about who you want to watch your video and what action you want them to take having done so.  It’s crucial that you tailor your video’s style and content to appeal to the right people.  Consider age group, gender, location and tastes of the audience you want your video to connect with. 

Keep it Short – Successful viral videos are almost always short, usually just 1 or 2 minutes in length, if that. Online viewers have notoriously short attention spans, so keep it punchy to grab their attention.  If you do, they are likely to share your video across multiple social networking sites, quickly generating good momentum and potentially millions of views for your video marketing campaign. 

Make It Funny – Humour is often key to a successful video viral. Many of the most effective video viral campaigns have been driven by making people laugh.  People like to be entertained. There’s only one thing they like more – entertaining their friends. Make somebody laugh and the chances are they’ll want to do the same for their friends and will share your video with them. 

Distribute it Properly – So … you’ve made your video, but how do make sure it gets noticed in a crowded online world? If you put the video on your own website, even on the homepage, the chances are that unless your site already has a loyal following of thousands, it probably won’t get picked up by the right people. What you need to do is propagate the video across the Internet’s many video-sharing platforms. There’s a lot more out there than Youtube you know! You should also be posting news of the video’s release to you or your company’s blog, twitter feed and social networking profiles like Facebook.

No Hard Sell  - People watch videos to be entertained, not to discover information about a company’s products and services. They have to want to watch the video for its own entertainment value. If you give them the hard sell and bombard them information, you might as well not bother. They probably won’t watch it to the end, and are very unlikely to share it. 

Production Values – Don’t worry too much about production values. Your video needs to been watchable, with decent sound, but a good idea far outweighs shooting on a REDONE.

You can never guarantee that a video will "go viral", but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll give it every chance. If it does, viral video marketing can be one of the most cost-effective online marketing solutions around. But don’t put all your eggs in one basket though, viral videos should be one element of comprehensive marketing strategy, and not the main focus of it.

The real beauty is that viral videos mean that even the smallest business can compete online with the largest corporations. There are plenty of video production companies out there who will produce videos for you and many of them are worth working with, but if you have a good idea and video camera, you can do it yourself.