Most of us know a good viral video when we see it. We immediately want to pass it on to show others. But if you aren’t getting involved in viral video marketing yourself, perhaps now is the time to think about dipping your toes in the water.

When it comes to promoting their website or online business, a lot of people think in terms of creating written content. They write articles to distribute via article directories. They write press releases. They think in words rather than images.

But images are just as engaging if not more so. Every business can find a way to use viral video marketing to find new clients; it just takes some creative thinking to find the best way to do it.

For starters you don’t want to create a long video because it won’t appeal to people with a short attention span. So whether you are standing in front of the camera speaking, or you have created a cartoon of some kind, make sure you keep the length down to a minute or so – perhaps even less. Five minutes might not seem like a long time but the longer the video is the less likely it is that people will watch it through to the end. And if they don’t watch the whole thing they won’t recommend it to others.

It is also not enough to simply create a video and sit back and wait for things to happen. You need to work at making viral video marketing successful for you. If you have a blog write a blog post around the topic of your first attempt at creating a viral video. Provide a link to it or embed the video in the blog post itself. Encourage people to link to it and share it as well – sometimes just asking can make a difference!

You also need to make sure you provide a link from the video back to your own website. You won’t get the benefit from any video if you don’t do this. Even if your video ends up getting a million views, where will those million people go if they can’t see your website address anywhere? That’s right – they’ll go on to the next video that interests them and yours will soon be forgotten.

Some people overlay their website address in the video itself, so it appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the screen. You can also add it to the ‘more info’ section which appears to the right of the video itself on YouTube.

As you can see, viral video marketing needs to be worked at for it to be a success. You cannot simply create videos and hope for the best. Link to them as much as you can, create pathways so people can find them more easily and encourage them to share what you have made. Some will be more successful than others, and once you get a surefire success on your hands you will understand how powerful viral video marketing really is.