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Do you want to make your video viral? Surprising as it may sound but YouTube is not the best platform for that. In this episode, Nate Woodbury shares with us what it means, how a video becomes one, and his strategies in making a video viral. Check this out!
Do you want to know how to make a YouTube video go viral? I know how to have a video get millions of millions of views but there’s a secret. You actually can’t have a video go viral on YouTube. What!? -What? -I’m going to explain how to get a lot of views and what I’m talking about. -So, how do you get a million… How do you get a YouTube video to go viral if it’s not on YouTube? I don’t get it. -Yeah. So, what viral means is that it’s shared a lot, right? So, if the Facebook is the place where things can go viral, if you put a post the people just love. Maybe it’s a video of your dog. You know, just really cute. Then somebody else shares that they share it, they shared. So, it spreads and it goes viral, okay? YouTube is really not a good social platform. It’s an amazing platform but you’re not social. If you wanted to show me a YouTube video, how would you show me that YouTube video? -I usually text a link. -You get the link and you text it? Or you’d message it or you email it. I mean you can’t really YouTube it. -That’s interesting. -Right? You’re not going to like somehow share… We’re not connected on YouTube. -It’s interesting. -So, things really can’t viral… they are trying to fix it. But YouTube just doing so many things right. The other platforms are doing wrong that it’s like. They don’t want to… They don’t want to break what they’ve got a good thing going. -Yeah. So, but that’s interesting though. Because you’ve heard of videos going viral. And a video can go viral but it can’t go viral on YouTube. Somebody can take a YouTube video and have it go viral. Maybe it gets featured on a news station or in a newspaper or somebody else’s blog or on Facebook. Even though Facebook and YouTube are enemies. And… -What? -Yeah. If… This is just a side note a little bonus. If you put a link in your YouTube description that goes to Facebook, YouTube will… And somebody clicks on it they… “What? That person left and went to Facebook? We’re going to we’re not going to show this video as much.” Same thing on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook and there’s a link, “Hey go check out my YouTube video.” And they leave and they go to YouTube.” Facebook is going to bury that post. -Oh, my gosh. -So, they’re ay war. Anyway. That’s just a side bonus. -So, how does one do it then? -If you… I mean to go viral, you’ve got to create viral worthy content. And I don’t know I don’t know how to do it. I have never created a video that’s gone viral yet. I have videos that have gotten millions of views. -Which sounds like…? -Well just end the video there. Alright. So my strategy on YouTube to get views to get traffic, there’s actually 2 different strategies. 1 is search. Meaning that YouTube is an amazing search engine. People go to Google and YouTube asking questions. And they’re looking for videos to watch to answer their questions. And so, I love doing… We’ve talked about this before. Keyword research before filming. Because you can really pull in all these searchers. I mean people all around the globe right now are asking questions about interior design that you have the answer for. So, just by making videos that answer their questions, you’re pulling in that search traffic. And that’s… That’s kind of the foundation with all the clients that I work with, is we start with keyword research. Finding all those questions and we just go after question after question after question. And you start to build a gradual momentum. I like to look at each video as a machine. So, if you make one video that’s pulling in a little bit of search traffic every single month and I set that one aside and it still keeps working but then you make another one. And you set that one aside and each video becomes the machines. And I’ve got this these army of video machines that are just pulling in traffic. So eventually, you’re getting thousands and tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of views every month even though each video is just pulling in there a little bit. You’ve got a whole pile of them. -Do the videos keep pulling in there a little bit indefinitely over time or do they kind of like put the older videos down the…? -It’s a very good question. The answer is they keep pulling their bit all for years and years to come. In fact, I’ve typically seen it gets better and better over time. -Really. -Which is the opposite of Facebook or email or… I mean if you if you write… You put your heart into an amazing email, right? You just, “I’ve got so much value.” I’m going to you send it out. It gets viewed a lot that day. Maybe it trickles the next day. Same with Facebook. If you put amazing post on Facebook, you know, it might last a week. It’s just as if it’s a super amazing, it might go 2 weeks. And you get thousands of views on this post, right? A month from now, a year from now. How many views is it getting? -And that’s the thing about Facebook too, is you can’t really search Facebook. You can only scroll on Facebook and so… Like we know, people don’t scroll very far down. -The Facebook’s trying to fix that and like bringing up memories. “Remember this happened a year ago?” And that’s how they’re trying to repurpose old content. But I don’t I get annoyed by those most the time. Sometimes they’re cute. Sometimes if it’s like, “Oh, look at him 5 years ago.” You know, my son or something but… -Anything about my son and I think it’s awesome. -But it’s not… It’s not… It doesn’t even compare to what YouTube has done where you can create a video, 5 years from now, it’ll still be performing for you. -Yeah. That’s one of the benefits. Okay, so that that’s one huge way that you can get a lot of traffic. But that’s gradual. Usually when you think of viral, you think of something getting a spike like… Also and it just took off. And you can actually do that on YouTube. In a previous episode that we filmed together I was providing you some coaching. I didn’t introduce you. -Hi! -Katie Gutierrez. You need to check her out. She’s really wanting to do some amazing things on YouTube and that’s why I’m here helping her out. And we thought we would film it. So… Alright. In a previous video, we talked about… What do we talk about? We talked about how to make money on YouTube? And I talked about how YouTube has this partner program. Where advertisers pay money to YouTube. Go ahead just yawn. It’s okay. So, YouTube as the partner program we talked about. Where advertisers pay money to YouTube to show their ads. 55% of that goes to the creator of the videos. Which is really cool. -That’s very cool. So, YouTube is looking for good videos to promote. Meaning, good videos that perform well and bring in more advertising revenue. And that’s good for us because we get 55% of that revenue. It’s like we’ve got this partnership. It’s not like it it’s… We do have this partnership with YouTube. It’s really really cool. While you’re following the search strategy, if you make 5 videos a week, meaning 5 videos go live each week on YouTube. And you do that for 4 months, there’s something magical that happens. -Oh my gosh. -Okay? That sounds like a lot and it is. Their strategic ways of doing it if you’ve got a busy schedule like we do, okay? We’re filming 20 episodes today. Okay. It’s lighten up. That’s an entire month’s worth. Okay. So… -And it’s so effortless. -So, if we launch 5 episodes per week and we do that for 4 months, then in addition to getting all that search traffic that’s gradually building momentum, YouTube will take one of our videos… Get a high 5 five. High 5 for yawns. She’s having a hard time staying awake in this this topic. When I told her that video can’t go viral on YouTube, she’s like… -Forget it, I’m done. You know what it is? Is that I have a bad habit of holding my breath? – Breathe. -Yeah. And I realized that I don’t and I could benefit from working on it’s like breathing. Because then I like hold my breath hold my breath away rather hold my breath and then my breath is like, take a deep breath, you need to yawn.” -You’re making her nervous. -Stop it Margaret. -Okay, Margaret. So, 5 videos a week for 4 months. What YouTube will then do is pick one of your videos and start to promote it for you. So, you don’t have to pay. This is all organic. You just create the great content. And YouTube will take one of your videos and start to put it as a suggestive video next to other people’s videos. So have you seen that? When you weren’t watching YouTube, you’ve seen recommended videos. -“You like this, you might like this.” -Hmm. So, your videos will start to appear there and will start to appear on the YouTube home screen. And so when your your views are going like this getting gradually was steeper and steeper and all of the sudden you’ll just have a spike. And then it will settle down. But that spike not only did it cause a lot of views but it brought in a lot of new subscribers. So, let’s say this is your average, we’ll keep my hand here. Then you have a spike when it settles back down, you’re at a new baseline. A much higher average. And then later to have another spike and another spike. -And those baseline keeps growing with every spike. -Mm-hmm I’ve seen a channel double in size in 5 weeks from 80,000 to 160,000 subscribers. -What? -Just because we were… -So I’m seeing it’s very very important to be putting out a lot of content all the time. That seems to be like a key. -Yeah, YouTube loves consistency. They love to promote channels that are doing the right things creating the type of content that are going to benefit YouTube. So, if we really are in a partnership with YouTube, if we create videos that we know is going to make YouTube money, they’re going to promote it which in turn we get paid 55% of that and when we got a business behind it. You know, we’re we make way more. -So, it’s like a snowball effect. -So, that’s how you make a video viral. It’s not really going viral. But it’s almost better than viral because it doesn’t like… Something that goes viral it kind of it eventually cools down and slows down. Whereas the the videos that YouTube starts to promote… Its promoting it because it’s a moneymaker for YouTube. And it will continue to promote that video because it likes to make money. The difference between a video going viral and what you’re talking about is a viral video like you only want to watch that cute cat video one time. But with this like cultivating this YouTube following, you’re really creating a loyal follower. And then it’s the loyal follower that’s going to keep watching all your videos and then if you create this tribe of loyal video watchers. Then all of your videos are more likely to be viral, viral. -Now, that that’s really the huge point here. The huge advantage of YouTube is it’s not just a marketing platform. This isn’t just advertising or getting traffic that turns off. You’re actually building a real following. These are real people that subscribe, that love you that want to want more from you and want what you have to offer. So, let me know what you think about that? What do you think about me saying that a video can’t go viral on YouTube. Do you agree with me or do you disagree? I’m interested to hear your comments below. And we’ll see you tomorrow.