Pre-production will make or break your video. Take the time to understand “The Why” behind your video. Ask yourself, Whats is driving you to go out and spend your own resources to create this video? Fundamentally, there has to be a strong reason why you decided to create the piece. Use that energy and driving force to know your market. If you are creating a video about Real Estate, identify the top 10 blogs in the Real Estate niche. Use free tools like Google Ad planner, technotari, delicious, tweetmeme to discover great community sites all around the interwebs. While visiting the blogs try to pay attention to the type of items they blog about, learn about the community and its members. Research  why was it that particular website started? Who is behind it? All of this information that will become useful as you produce the video, and it will make it easier to market you video. The important part here is find your audience, make sure that your content co insides with what that particular community may consider valuable. Our hillarious “Wii Bowling Championship” video is a great example of video tailored made for a particular audience, this particular video was featured in kotaku and a few other niche blogs.

After identifying the top communities, go create your awesome video. Be creative! Have fun. Try to keep the video length as short as possible, and adhere the editing to some sort of rhythm. GMTV follows a set of magical production rules for youtube and online videos but that’s an elephant worthy of another post. Now that you have this awesome video, upload the video and send out the link to all the niche communities you recently discovered. Personality and authenticity must be at the core of your message. Top bloggers have their inboxes bombarded with links to content, and press releases filled hogwashed turd dirt. Keep the message length as short as possible. At this point in the game you should thoroughly understand the communities you are contacting. If you dont got back to preproduction and start over. Editors/ community leaders actually love the fact that you created excellent content that tailor fits with their audience, and will allow you to build a better relationship for future videos. They will blog about it, and their readers will share it with their friends.

The key is to be specific about the audience you target, and allowing them to be the first to exclusively watch the video. People who are not in your core audience could have an adverse effect on viral sharing. They may just not into that kind of video, so they might not like it, as a end result they wont share it. Increase engagement by searching for the afficionados and the crazies in your niche, and create an idea that they would love.