Viral videos are a great way to sell books.  According to Wikipedia “A viral video is a video clip that gains widespread popularity through the process of a Internet sharing, typically through email or a Instant messaging, blogs and other media sharing websites. Viral videos are often humorous in nature”.

There are three key points to consider when creating a viral video campaign:

  1. Provide great, but ambiguous, content – Everyone loves to hear a great story. But in a viral video, the story has to be short (less than three minutes). Don’t think of creating a video that will sell your book, think of a video that will keep people entertained.
  2. Generate a “residual” fan base Once your video is built you can integrate other social media tools to build a user base and communicate with them.  To do this, follow the lessons learned in Social Networking for Authors-Untapped Possibilities for Wealth. It could be as simple as a subscribe link that notifies users of your updates.
  3. SEO it– Your video has to be easily discovered through YouTube search and other popular online video sharing sites. Videos
    should have clear titles, an accurate description and appropriate
    keyword tags so that they can appears correctly in a YouTube search and
    targeted specifically.

A good viral video will spread over the Internet like wildfire. See the
top 20 viral videos circulating around the Internet now at:

http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/

Check out this viral video I created for an author during the last
presidential election. It got great coverage. The video is ambiguous
but gets people curious as to what is coming next. A typical viral
video will cost about $2,000 but will be a great return on your
investment if it works properly:

http://revver.com/u/jspinx

Michael Volkin is the author of the new hit book: Social Networking for Authors-Untapped Possibilities for Wealth. His book can be found at SellaTonofBooks.com