It doesn’t have to be that way. Both individuals and companies have mastered the process of systematically creating a viral buzz, to the point where they can just about engineer a viral campaign from scratch at any time.

Creating a viral buzz is an art, but it’s also in large part a science. Here are the most important components of creating a viral buzz.

1. Do Something Completely Off the Wall

Things that are interesting get “likes.” Things that are completely off the wall, completely out of the blue and completely original actually get shared and reposted.

The things that tend to go viral tend to be edgy and mildly not politically correct. If your brand supports that kind of marketing, you’ll have to consciously decide whether you’re willing to take the risk by launching these kinds of campaigns.

2. Write Down Your Crazy Ideas

Once you start thinking about wacky viral marketing ideas, you’ll probably start having ideas left and right.

It’s really important that you write these ideas down quickly and keep them all in one place.

It’s very hard to hold more than one good idea in your head at any one time. If you have three great ideas, chances are at least one will get left in the dust.

Write all your promotion ideas down, even if you won’t actually act on them for a few months.

3. The Viral Launching Pad

For a viral campaign to take off, you need to have a base of people who start using your product.

While nobody actually knows how many people need to see your site for it to have a chance to go viral, most viral marketing experts estimate it at more than 1,000 people but less than 10,000 people.

So how do you get 1,000+ people to see your viral campaign?

Of course, the easiest way is to have an existing user base. But what if you don’t?

The easiest way is to just pay for the traffic. High traffic blogs will usually be willing to make a guest post for a few hundred dollars. You could even just put up some AdWords campaigns. At $0.25 per click, 1,000 people will cost you just $250 to take a shot at launching a viral campaign.

If you have your viral launching pad of 1,000 to 10,000 people and you have a completely off-the-wall idea that people in the industry have never seen before, you’ll have a very good chance of getting a lot of exposure.

Here’s how to set up a Google AdWords Campaign

Step #1 – Sign up for an account. It’s free. Visit adwords.google.com/ and sign up. If you already have a Gmail account, analytics account or other account, you can simply log onto your account, visit “Advertising Programs” or “Business solutions” and follow the links.

Step #2 – Research your keywords. You may already be familiar with the Google AdWords keyword tool. If not, you can find it here adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You’re looking for keywords that represent your product or service.

You also ideally want the keywords to have low supply and high demand. That will help your campaign be successful. The more supply there is for a keyword, the more expensive it will be for you to garner a first page position. Additionally, you want a lot of demand for your keywords so you reach plenty of eyeballs.

Step #3 – Click “create your first campaign”. You’ll be prompted to enter a campaign name. Choose a name that helps you stay organized. This is particularly important if you have multiple businesses, multiple offers and/or will be creating multiple campaigns.

Step #4 – You’ll also be prompted to choose your campaign settings at this time. These will be things like language, location, your daily budget and so on. Pay attention to these settings but if you’re unsure, that’s okay. You can go back and change them at any time. One that you may change often is your daily budget.

Step #5 – Once you’ve chosen your keywords simply click on the keywords tab on your AdWords account and campaign screen. Begin adding your keywords. You’ll also notice a negative keywords space. Negative keywords are keywords you don’t want your ad to show up for.

For example, if you have the keywords, “dog trick training,” and your negative keyword is “video” then anyone entering dog trick training video won’t see your advertisement.

Step #6 – You’ll then be prompted to add your text including your headline which is allowed 25 characters, your two body copy lines each getting 35 characters and your URL. It’s recommended to split test your advertisements to get the best results and return on your investment. You can test any aspect of your ad including your headline, your URL and your offer.

Step #7 – Stay on top of your PPC campaign results. Track your CTR and your daily budget. Make sure they’re lined up with your goals!

Pay Per Click campaigns can be extremely effective for driving both sales and traffic. However, a strategy and a plan to follow up is always advised. Start slowly, track results and repeat your success.

One advertising medium that it is very easy to overlook though is the advertising program run by Facebook. Advertising on Facebook gives companies the ability to target their advertising efforts with laser accuracy while staying within almost any budget.

While Facebook does offer larger, more expensive campaigns for companies willing to shell out the kind of big bucks necessary for a large campaign with such a popular site, in this article we’ll focus on the benefits of using Facebook’s user ad publishing system, which any Facebook user can utilize.

The types of ads produced by Facebook’s user ad manager are the ones you’ll see on the far right hand side of the page while you’re surfing Facebook profiles. They are simple box ads with a title/link, a short description and an optional image.

Targeting:

The real attraction with Facebook ads is the ability for the user to target their ads with exceptional precision. Facebook ads can be targeted using the following parameters.

Geographic: When creating a Facebook ad, you begin by targeting geographically by country, state/province or city, depending on how narrow you want your geographical focus to be.

Age and Sex: You can specify your audience to be male, female or both, within any age range between 13 to 65. If you want your ad to show only to 23 year old men, then your ads won’t be shown to anyone outside of that demographic.

Keywords: This optional field will narrow your audience based on trigger words that occur in their Facebook profiles. Using a lot of keywords will generally drastically narrow your audience.

Education: You can choose to target by education with options including college grad, in college and in high school. If you select a single option, you can further narrow your targeting down to specific schools and even specific majors.

Workplaces: While Facebook is populated mostly by students, many workplaces have their own Facebook groups where employees chat and post information. You can use this field to target specific workplaces.

Relationship Status and Sexual Orientation: Finally, you can target your audience using relationship status (single, in a relationship, engaged, married) and sexual orientation (interested in men or interested in women).

After choosing all of the targeting factors for your ad, the Facebook ad manager will display the approximate number of users your that make up your targeted group. For instance, targeting people in the United States of all ages and all sexes, with no limiting factors chosen gives an approximate audience size of just over 42 million people. Meanwhile, choosing to target single men between the ages of 18 and 25 in Providence, Rhode Island yields an approximate audience size of 12,480 people.

Payment:

When putting up a Facebook ad, you have a couple of options as to how you want to pay for your message to be distributed among your target audience. The first option is Pay Per Click or PPC for short. This is the same system as most Google Adwords users will be familiar with, in which you bid a certain price that is the maximum you’re willing to pay for someone to click on your link and come to your site, and you’re charged a certain price at or below that bid (depending on competition) every time your ad is clicked through. This model works very well for campaigns in which your goal is to bring traffic to your website or landing page. The real benefit is that you only pay when a viewer takes action by clicking on your ad.

The second option is the CPM option, in which you pay not for clicks, but for views. In this option you set a bid that is the highest price you are willing to spend for your ad to be viewed 1000 times. A view constitutes any time your ad is shown on a users screen and 1000 views normally goes by very quickly! This model works very well for ads that have been proven to have exceptionally high click through rates. If you know that your ad will receive a lot of clicks, choosing the PPC model could end up costing an arm and a leg, whereas choosing the CPM model may cost you significantly less.

Optimization:

Writing Facebook ads optimally is generally the same as writing most other small format ads for the internet, which is covered in other posts and as such will not be discussed in detail here. However, one unique aspect of Facebook ads in relation to many other ad services is the ability to include a picture with your ad. This is an often overlooked, but extremely valuable option. When making facebook ads, always opt to put in an image. The better the image matches your ad, the better it will do, but overall, leaving an image out is normally a good way to make sure your ad doesn’t get noticed.