Recently I’ve caught a great guest post on TechCrunch entitled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos“. If you still think most viral things don’t have people working behind the scenes you need to crawl from under your rock.

Here is a juicy excerpt, but there’s much more to the original post:

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list [on YouTube]?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly.

See the entire post on TechCrunch, it’s extremely interesting if you’re into marketing on the web. Even funnier is reading the comments, as half the purists start acting all shocked to hear that this is going on (read: naive), while the other half thinks this is awesome and obviously expected (which is where I fall in for better or for worse).

Yet there’s even a third camp somewhere among all those who commented who thought the entire post was a publicity stunt by TechCrunch and that the initial comments were fake too, just as the author alluded to faking some for marketing.  I don’t think it was a stunt though, but it really doesn’t matter anymore as that’s how it played out on Digg and so on.