According to current Alexa rankings, YouTube is the number three most visited website on all of the Internet, surpassed only by Google and Yahoo. Millions and millions of users flock to YouTube every day to indulge in viewing and commenting on videos, spending what, for some, can often turn into hours staring at the monitor.

In this article we’ll look at 5 key points that can help lead to success, should you decide to give YouTube a run as your next big marketing medium.

1) Know your target demographics.

That goes without saying when we talk about marketing, but let’s just explain why it applies here. YouTube users, while varied and diverse, can generally be narrowed down enough to speak about generally. While everyone from four year olds to Grandma spend time on YouTube, the people who live and breath YouTube are going to be your 18-35 males.

While females in the same age group do also use YouTube quite a lot, and there are many users older and younger, the 18-35 male demographic are the people that are going to spend hours a day surfing YouTube and sending videos back and forth between their friends (this is important!)

Sure, this demographic tends to be the most desirable one anyways in many cases, but if your target audience sit outside this range, there are likely much better ways to spend your time and money than YouTube.

2) Go viral or go home.

A video of me feeding my dog or taking my garbage out might be entertaining to me (“look how well I poured that cat food! Not a bit spilled”), but that’s probably the extent of it. If you’re going to try and use YouTube to get your message out, your ultimate goal should be for your video to grow virally.

That word, viral, is said so much these days that it’s going out of style, but there’s a reason, it’s important! You want your video to spread around, as quickly as possible, and to be seen by as many people in your demographic (and in general) as possible. Otherwise, why are you even using this medium in the first place? When you sit down to plan your campaign, always have this in mind.

Any ideas that come up that don’t reek of potential to spread quickly likely aren’t of any value. While you never know exactly what will go viral (I’m sure the parents that posted a video of their baby laughing didn’t expect almost 74 million views to date), you can generally tell whether something has the potential, as there are some aspects that essentially all the videos that really take off.

3) Make it funny, make it weird, make it shocking, or don’t make it.

Going viral happens because someone sees a video and deems it so awesome that they simply have to email it to their friends, their mom, their boss and their priest. As stated above, mundane videos won’t do this. If you want to ensure that your video has the potential to spread like wild-fire, you pretty much have to make sure that it’s funny, weird, shocking, or some other form of general awesomeness.

If you look at the top 25 most watched YouTube videos you’ll notice that while some may be cute, some may be cool, the aspect that you see most represented is comedy. Whether it be comedians or little kids being bitten by their brothers, things that make people keel over laughing tend to spread the fastest and widest. Whatever method you choose to go down to give your video the legs it needs to run across the net, there are certain warnings to heed!

4) Know your brand and know what it means to your customers.

There is a certain danger with viral video marketing, namely that many of the things that tend to go viral can also have a tendency to be on the edge of cleanliness, and certain brands may end up being hurt more than they stand to benefit.

Take the “Landlord” video, made famous by starring Will Ferrell and available on FunnyorDie.com. 61 million views for a video that isn’t on YouTube is a massive success. As viral as they come. However, the real star of this video isn’t Ferrell, it’s the landlord, who is a cursing, beer drinking…little girl. Funny? Sure. Viral? Sure. But does your brand want to be associated with swearing, boozing toddlers?

Maybe it does. Maybe your brand is edgy and your customers won’t look at such an association negatively. But maybe not. Always make sure that whatever your video is portraying isn’t going to conflict in someway with the core values of your brand.

5) Figure out what you want from the video and design it to deliver on that goal.

What do you want your video to do for you? Do you want it to build brand awareness? Do you want it to help sell something? Do you want it to drive traffic to your website? It’s very important that you recognize exactly what your goals for the campaign are, and that you realize a few truths about YouTube and it’s viewers.

Firstly, people aren’t on YouTube to watch commercials. If your video is plastered with your products, logo and marketing messages, it’s probably worthless to bother going any further. A good example of tasteful branding is Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, sponsored by Burger King. People watch the videos to see the funny stuff, not to see the BK stuff, so Burger King does a very short intro, which is in itself comical, and then a little bit of branding at the end. That’s it.

The next thing to realize is that it’s very unlikely people will leave YouTube to go to your website, unless you somehow entice them to. People on YouTube may love your video, and they’re happy you made it, but they don’t care about you enough to go check out your website just out of the goodness of their hearts.

Offer them something at the end of the video or in the description at the side that they can only get through your website, or they’ll never get their, especially not with so many other hilarious related videos being suggested to them by YouTube at the end of yours!

Finally, if you’re trying to directly sell something, you’d better find a way of featuring your product and making people crack up or say “wow” at the same time. Blendtec is the perfect example of this. They use video to help sell blenders by posting clips of them blending up ridiculous items like golf clubs and bricks (and people love it). Whatever your goal, define it ahead of time and make sure YouTube is a viable medium to deliver on what you’re looking for.

Making videos doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be. That being said, money is the easy part, a great idea with an almost certain chance of success  is the hard part. It takes planning and time. The key is to analyze beforehand whether YouTube is a good medium for your business to get it’s message across.

If it’s not, don’t bother wasting all that time and money on something that won’t work for you. If it is, follow these five rules and you’ll be far better off than if you just wing it and post something up on a hope and a prayer.