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Creating your own viral videos can most certainly be fun and all you need is a video camera. It seems that viral videos have become hugely popular and increasingly effective since the dawn of the powerfully viral website YouTube.com.

YouTube.com has grown rapidly in popularity, reaching currently the 16th most visited website according to Alexa, and it has only been around for just over a year.

For those of you who don't know what YouTube.com is, I'll give you an explanation. It's the top viral video site online, allowing anyone to post a video that they created. YouTube has a built in viral aspect, so that after you watch a video you like, you can immediately email it to your friends, blog it, save it to your favorites, or add it to groups.

This means that anyone can create a video, submit it to YouTube, and if people like what they see, you'll soon have your video spread virally all across the web to viewers everywhere.

So are you ready to make a viral video?

If so, then you'll need to keep a few things in mind. If you're doing it for marketing reasons, then you'll need to get your marketing message across clearly so that it's effective. If you want people to visit your website, then make sure your website URL is displayed in the video where people can see it, and make it an easy url to remember. It is usually most effective to have a "call to action" either as an invitation to visit your website, or perhaps even a more detailed request of what the viewer should do.

Creating a video that appeals to your target audience is key. Remember that you want people to share the video with their friends, so you have to add an aspect that gives it enough of an impact on the viewer that they'll choose to spread it virally.

The best ways to make your video viral, is to show something that is either newsworthy, extremely funny, outrageous, extraordinary, and perhaps even taboo.

It will take a bit of creativity, but if you just go to YouTube and watch some of the highest rated videos, then you'll get a good idea of what you're trying to emulate to make your video viral.

One more thing to remember, is to make sure you can easily link your marketing message to your video. If you make a really funny video that is super viral, but totally unrelated to the website you display at the end, then you're not going to do too well. Sure you may have succeeded in creating a viral video, but you've failed in expressing your marketing message effectively. You can go out of the boundaries of your marketing message a little bit, but you need to have a firm link to your marketing message that makes your video appeal to your target market and make them want to know more.