How effective are viral videos at driving traffic?

Video clips are used to generate click-throughs and subscriptions. Videos ranging in length and promotional content are placed on video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video. The Video specifies a URL, indicating that there’s a website that may be interesting or relevant to the viewer. A link is also provided on the same page as the video, which potentially drives traffic back to the main Website. Videos can be sorted into various categories such as Personal Blog (global issues, spirituality, current events) and Comedy (spoofs, skits, celebrity parody), to mention but a few.

The intention is not to produce a professional looking video that you’d expect from an advertising agency, instead in many instances, video clips are shot in an "amateurish" way and carries though a very ‘unprofessional’ image in their approach and production. This is done deliberately as a professional image would most definitely inhibit the viral potential of videos and set the videos apart from the ‘ordinary’ videos created by individuals on the web. A point worth mentioning is that although promotional, viral videos normally do not contain a sales message, there may be product placement or a sales pitch on a landing page.

Note that entertaining or provocative videos can quickly become viral, being shared by tens or even hundreds of thousands of viewers, most of them connected through online social networks. However, it is important to understand the nature of the environment in which video clips are most widely distributed and shared. If you simply add a video clip to your site or blog, and to YouTube, you will be taking advantage of only a small fraction of the opportunity that exists. In the same way that you optimize your web sites and blogs for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, you also have to optimize the presentation of your video clips in order to be found through searches within social network community sites.