"The Evolution of Dance" - 115,000,000 views & counting

Gone are the days when you could upload a video on to YouTube and end up with a major international success. When Judson Laipply posted his six-minute "Evolution of Dance" video on YouTube in April of 2006 it was a sensational hit garnering 100 million views. His follow-up "Evolution of Dance 2″ is hovering at about 4 million views after about six weeks - a metric that the first video hit within a few days.

As the amount of online video explodes the task only gets harder. Viral video marketing experts say that there are three key points to keep in mind when creating a viral video campaign.

"If you just upload to YouTube, it's like dropping a grain of sand on the beach," says Ian Schafer, chief executive of New York ad agency Deep Focus. "But it's weird, you can't just blast these out as a press release. People need to feel that sense of discovery when they come onto it."

There are three important factors in creating a sense of discovery in a viral video campaign.

1) Great Content - It goes without saying that content of the video has to be worth being discovered. Many popular online videos are short - under three minutes - and have some elements of cognitive dissonance.

In the fall of 2006, Tom Dickson, founder of Utah blender manufacturer Blendtec, donned a white lab coat and blended a rotisserie chicken, a McDonalds Extra Value meal, a bag of marbles and a rake. The video got picked up by the news aggregator Digg.com, and within a week it had attracted more than 5 million views.

Since then, Mr. Dickson has blended everything from an iPhone to a TomTom navigational device, and built a following for his regular "Will it Blend?" segments. "We're not creating advertising," says Blendtec Vice President George Wright. "We're creating something people want to watch." He says that Blendtec's videos have been viewed more than 200 million times.

2) Build a Fan Base - Huge audiences, such as the 15 million who have watched more than 200 people freeze in place at New York City's Grand Central Station - don't often materialize overnight.

Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere, which staged the Grand Central video, began loading his troupe's videos onto YouTube soon after the site launched in 2005. He has staged more than 80 events - such as the No Pants Subway Ride 2009 - and posted most of them on YouTube.

"We have a pop-up at the end of the video that says 'Click here to see all of our other videos and subscribe,'" Mr. Todd says. "That's one thing that everyone should do on YouTube." As a result, Improv Everywhere has 105,000 subscribers who receive notifications whenever he posts a new video.

Mr. Todd also promotes his videos to bloggers, and he spends time reading blogs to see which ones would likely be interested in a particular video. But he prefers to do his promotion anonymously, usually by e-mailing a tip to a general blog address. "I think that's probably better than tracking down the e-mail address of the person who runs the blog and will get irritated," he says. "Just send it in and say check it out."

Blendtec built a following around "Will it Blend?" video series. The company put the video on its website and integrated other social media tools to build a user base and communicate with them. It could be as simple as a subscribe link that notifies users of new videos or comments or updates.

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3) Search Engine Optimization - Your video has to be easily discovered through YouTube search. To do so videos should have clear titles, an accurate description and appropriate keyword tags so that they can appears correctly in a YouTube search and targeted specifically.

"You have to put in dedication and time," says Aaron Zamost, spokesman for Google Inc.'s YouTube. "People don't know how much work uploaders put into this stuff."

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It's also part of the YouTube culture for videos to piggy-back on each other's success. If a video is popular, YouTubers often race to create 'video responses' that will then appear next to the popular video. A great example of that is a video highlighting a glitch in an Electronic Arts' video game that appeared to show a pixelated Tiger Woods walking on water. In response, the gamemaker posted a video that showed the real Tiger Woods literally walking on water - which attracted a far bigger audience than the original video.

We like that low-risk piggy-back approach, if your video is a hit. We attach ourselves to content we know will travel. Instead of creating something with the hope that it might."

That way you can be sure that your video will be discovered - which is the whole point.