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Viral videos can be a great way to advertise; they can bring you thousands, if not millions, of targeted viewers. Making a viral video isn’t as easy as it seems however, and even though plenty of amateur clips do go viral, creating an advertising video with the hopes that it goes viral is completely different. If you are considering using viral video for advertising, avoid these mistakes, or the only people watching your video will be grandma and the dog.

The worst thing you can do in your viral video is pretend your not advertising. Yeah, you don’t want to make some boring “buy this” video but trying to hide the fact that you are advertising will probably end up coming back to bite you in the butt. You can make your advertising obvious if it’s packaged in a video that is funny, interesting, surprising, or a combination of all three. Give your video a reason to be shared and it will go viral, whether it looks like a commercial or not.

Another common mistake made when trying to create the next big viral video is spending a small fortune on production. There is no reason why you or your company has to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars creating a viral video and that kind of budget will probably just make your video turn out to be a bunch of overpriced hooey. The most popular viral videos are usually shot by amateurs and there’s a reason why, they look real and are unpretentious. Sure your video can go viral if it is shot smoothly with something other than a cell phone camera but please don’t drop 500K on a video that could be made more successfully on a fraction of that budget.

When you are subjected to advertising which is more effective, some suit saying “hey, buy my product!” or a commercial where you are engaged? Don’t make the mistake of many would-be viral videos and talk to consumers instead of engage them. A viral video is not the same thing as a TV commercial spot where you have a few seconds to tell the viewer about your product (and successful commercials don’t do this either) so make sure your viral video is engaging whether it is funny, surprising, controversial, weird, or whatever.

Let’s say that you have created the next big viral video as a part of your advertising campaign. One of the worst mistakes you can make is to estimate unrealistic conversion rates. Let’s face it, while viral videos are great advertising tools, they are one of the hardest advertising mediums to measure. And while you can measure views on all the major video sharing sites, it is not possible to track what viewers do next and get concrete numbers on how many viewers were moved enough to visit your site or buy your product. I’m not saying that viral videos are not a good advertising idea; they are just hard to measure.

The last big mistake made in the realm of viral videos is to just give up. Didn’t your mother tell you that if at first you don’t succeed try, try again? Even if creating your own creative viral video is not possible because you are devoid of the creativity a viral video needs, there are plenty of services that will help you with every step of the process, and even keep you well under the outrageous budget mentioned before. If you have already made a “viral video” that didn’t quite catch on don’t give up, make another one. There is still plenty of room left on You Tube.