Tasha Harrison

There is a huge misconception that you can make a fun video, post it on Youtube and it will be watched by millions of people, possibly even making it onto a ‘Best Youtube Videos Ever’ programme. Sadly, it is extremely difficult to create a video that actually goes viral. There are an estimated 24 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, so it’s incredibly easy for your video to get lost.

Creating a Viral Campaign

However, it is still possible to create a viral campaign if you have a greater plan. Volkswagen have created a viral campaign called ‘The Fun Theory’. Run in Sweden, the campaign sought to prove that you can change people’s behaviour by making things fun. It then invited people to submit their own ideas as part of a competition. The competition took place at the end of last year, but today I stumbled across one of the videos on Youtube, using StumbleUpon (a social bookmarking site).

Below is the video I stumbled:

I came across the campaign by accident, which is the result of a viral campaign. This campaign was paid for by a large business. They put money into the videos, they built a site and, no doubt, spent a great deal of money on advertising. This gave the campaign the impetus to become viral, it was given a huge shove in the right direction.

It also doesn’t seek to explicitly sell cars, it appears to be done simply for the sake of doing something fun. It associates ‘fun’ with ‘Volkswagen’. This is a very effective brand building campaign!

The saying goes that links are the currency of the internet. As social media has expanded, your followers and fans have become the most important currency, but as far as SEO (search engine optimisation) goes links are still very important.

Making your links relevant

Link building is by far the hardest part of SEO, creating relevant links that the search engines will deem valuable. There are a few rules that are worth noting:

1. Build links on sites that have relevant content ie the site’s content is connected to yours.
   For example, your site sells swimming pool accessories, so an ideal link would be a site selling swimming pools.
2. Include your keywords and phrases in the linking words.
   For example, your keyword is ‘swimming pool filter’, so in an ideal world your link would be – swimming pool filter

Building Links

Getting sites to link to you is a time consuming process, so don’t expect to suddenly have hundreds of links. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, but here are a few tips:

1. Directory submissions – there are hundreds of free directories that you can submit your site to. These aren’t as valuable as a link from a blog or news site, but it is the easiest way to start out.
2. Contact other site owners – if you find a site that is relevant, drop the site’s webmaster an email asking if they will link to your site.
3. Product reviews – contact bloggers that you think might be interested in your products and ask if they’d be interested in writing a review. Remember to always treat bloggers with respect, many of the popular one’s are inundated with these kind of requests.
4. Create content worth linking to – the most effective and most difficult way to build links. If your content is interesting and/or useful then people will link to it.

Good Luck

Having done link building campaigns for a variety of different businesses there really is no easy way to go about it. It takes imagination and determination! Remember to always think, ‘Why would someone link to my site?’

When measuring the success of your Tweeting it is important not to simply count the number of followers you have. You need to think about how many potential people are within your network.

For example, let’s imagine you have 200 followers. 2 of those followers retweet your link to their 200 followers. Suddenly you have reached a potential 600 people.

This fantastic video by vm-people, based in Berlin, is a great little animation showing how viral marketing works and explaining what it is.

Meta data is information that sits in the code of your site. You don’t actually see it on your page, but it is how search engines display your pages in their results and how they judge what your site is about.

There are two important parts of meta data:

1. Page Title
2. Meta Description

There are also meta keywords, but these are no longer regarded by Google since it became too easy to cheat. See Google’s reasons for why on the Google Webmaster blog.

Below is an example of how the information is displayed on Google.

Note how the meta description ends with ‘…’. This is because the meta description is too long, it is 37 words or 228 characters, but should actually be nearer 150 characters.

The description is an opportunity for you to sell your site and increase your click through rate from Google. If it is appealing to your audience then they will be more likely to click through to your site than to your competitors.

The page title also appears on the browser.

The page title is a good indicator for Google to tell what your site is about, so make sure you include your main keywords in it. The ideal length is between 60 – 65 characters.

And remember that it is used by real humans as well as the bots, so make it people friendly.