Viral marketing is a goal for virtually all Internet marketing experts. Finding or creating the next big viral marketing video can be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Your goal should not be trying to come up with the next YouTube sensation. Think smaller and you can succeed. Consider having a YouTube contest!
The YouTube Contest
A YouTube Contest will enable you to harness the collective creativity of the contestants. If you offer a great prize and promote your contest well you should get a good number of entries.
The contest should be set up so that contestants submit their entries to your website (make sure they do NOT post them on YouTube). This will enable you to check the quality and appropriateness of an entry before it appears on YouTube.
The contest can be the creation of a 30-second commercial for your company or a product demonstration. Establish rules to protect your copyrights and brands and make sure it is clear that you own all rights to any videos submitted.
After reviewing all the entries choose the finalists (try for at least 10 finalists) and post the videos on your YouTube channel.
The Voting Equals Viral Marketing
Each finalist video will be on your YouTube channel, plus you should create a separate blog entry on your blog for each video. Voting is based on the number of views multiplied by the rating of the video on YouTube plus the number of social bookmarking votes on the blog (from Digg, StumbleUpon, etc).
Basically you are setting up a voting system that will prompt the contestants to market their entry for you. They will send out the video link and ask that their contacts keep forwarding it off to their contact lists and so forth. This is creating 10 viral marketing campaigns or more depending on how many finalists you have. Keep the voting period to about 60 days before announcing the winner.
The Results
The results need to be tabulated carefully. Once you have tabulated the votes you should announce the winner or winners and the prize they received.
A YouTube contest is an easy way to create multiple viral marketing opportunities based on the creativity of your contestants. Make sure you market the contest well to maximize the number of entries and the quality of them. This is a great system for Internet marketing you can consider.
