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How To Make Your Videos Go Viral

This is the final bit of this webinar before we get into the question and answer session. A lot of people have asked me about this, you know, “How do you actually make your videos go viral?” Trust me, there’s been a lot of studies on this and books have been written on this.

In fact, if you’ve ever heard of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s an amazing book. It talks about the science behind stuff going viral. I really recommend you read that, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

The Definition Of Going Viral

Let’s just look at the definition of going viral. All it basically means is it’s like a virus that duplicates itself with everything it gets in contact with. Think about how this relates to your videos online. Now this is the key thing, every new contact then becomes a host and starts the process all over again. That creates that viral effect.

It’s the same sort of thing with the pyramid schemes. You have one person tell two of their friends and each of those two people tell two of their friends and before you know it, you’ve got a viral effect. That’s what it means to go viral.

So you need those things. You need the virus that duplicates itself and that new contact becomes the host to start the process again. Those are the requirements for something to go viral. It’s word of mouse on YouTube, not word of mouth. Word of mouse.

If you look at studies done, I mentioned this before, one of the most popular ways for people to get to YouTube is through referrals and having their friends tell them about a video. They’ll send an email to them at work and say, “Hey, check out this funny video.” Those are the key ways of getting people to your videos is word of mouse – recommendations, the most important vehicle for making your stuff go viral online.

The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell

I mentioned The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about three factors or three things that are needed for something to go viral.

The Law Of The Few

The law of the few, and this points to like the big guns, people with big lists or people with big influence – like for example those people with a lot of subscribers on YouTube. There are not many of them. There are only a few of them.

Stickiness Factor

There’s the stickiness factor. In other words, what’s going to encourage people to spread it and why would this message stick?

The Context

Then there’s the context. What is the context of the video? In our case it’s YouTube and the niche that you’re operating in.

The question is why would people want to promote it, what’s in it for them? Why would people want to spread the word about your video? I really recommend you read The Tipping Point. That’ll give you incredible insight into how to make your videos go viral. It’s a great book.

Of course, it’s difficult to engineer videos to go viral and sometimes they’ll just go viral without you even planning it. Sometimes you can engineer it. If you can, it can be very, very successful.

I’ve got a couple of methods here that I want to talk about. One I’ve tested and I’ve been able to get some good results, but I need to test it more. I’ll show you what I did.

The Viral Competition Method

The first one is what I’m calling the Viral Competition Method. This is basically use of competitions. There are six requirements that you need for this.

• First, you need a WIIFM factor, or What’s In It For Me factor – for example, a prize. People can win a prize if they enter into this thing.

• There’s the viral hub page. That’s your original host. This is often the YouTube video page. I’ll show you how this works in a second.

• There’s the opt-in catch. That’s the opt-in page where you give people the free report, or your squeeze page.

• You’ll need viral annotations, and these are the annotations where you link people back to your viral hub page. I’ll show you how this works in a second.

• You need a viral beachhead. This is the big guns. The viral beachhead, someone with a big list, someone with a big subscriber base, you need someone like that on board for this to work.

Let’s see how this works in action. We did a competition awhile ago for FreeMagicLive, me and JayJay. We created a video where we told people about a competition to win a Flip camera, but to be able to enter they had to do a few things. They had to go to our website, at www. StreetMagicMastery. com over here, and they had to perform a trick and submit their own video as a video response over there. For each of these videos, one of the requirements to enter is that they had to create this annotation here, this video annotation. Now what this annotation does is basically it links back to this video here. That’s what it does. Everybody that creates a video response has this annotation inside the video.

That means all their subscribers, all these people here – sorry, these videos are all the same, but it just represents all the subscribers of this channel here – they will see this video and they’ll click on it. They’ll watch our video, download our report, and then they’ll go ahead and multiply and do the same thing over and over. This is the theory behind this.

Now let’s look at some results. Let’s look at our competition video, See All. Now I’m not sure if it really went viral, but we certainly got a lot of views. We got 9,558 views. If you want to see this in action, I recommend you go to our channel and check out the video that says, “Want to win a brand new Flip video camera? It’s real easy to enter.” Check it out and see how we did it. Look at the elements.

Now that one was a little bit complicated, but I’m sure you can simplify it to get the same sort of effect. The important thing here is that you think about this viral concept. What are you using to make this thing go viral?

In our case, it’s this annotation theme that we get people to go back to this video, and also the requirement to click on our link and to download our report. That is the requirement of this competition. Everybody had to do that.

That’s the viral competition method. It’s pretty straight forward. It’s not that hard to do and it’s fun. It’s heaps of fun. We had 74 responses for our video, so it’s not as huge as that other guy, but our channel’s only seven or eight months old. We’re getting better as we go.

The Forced Referral Method

The second one is one that I still want to try. I’m going to explain it to you, because I really think this could work very, very well. This is called the forced referral method. For this there are six requirements.

• First, you need the viral beachhead. This is someone with a big list, either on YouTube or someone with an email list.

• You need the opt-in catch, which is your squeeze page.

• You need the multiplier factor. This is a tell-a-friend script, so that’s what’s going to help you multiply the number of people who sign up to your newsletter.

• You also need a viral video.

The first step is to have the viral beachhead. This is basically just someone with a massive email list or a YouTube user with a massive following, and you get them involved to basically send traffic to your squeeze page. That’s the next step.

Once people get into your squeeze page they’ll get a free resource, and before they can get access to this free resource, they’ll get sent to a page with a tell-a-friend script. This basically says, “If you want to get access to this free resource, first you need to tell three of your friends about it, then you’ll get your free resource.”

Once they’ve told their three friends, it’ll be like a simple form. It will send all their friends to this YouTube video. So you need this initial impetus from the viral beachhead to make this work.

You may be able to do that with your own list if you have one or you can find someone else, if you can think about a way to make it worthwhile for these people.

This is the key thing. Inside your YouTube video, you want to drive people back to the squeeze page. So that continues this process and it goes round and round in circles.

Every time people go through the tell-a-friend script batch, it gets three or five or however many people to visit your YouTube video. That’s how it goes viral. I haven’t tested this one. I’ve seen this used very effectively in other internet marketing situations – not with YouTube yet, but just with normal websites. It’s definitely something to test and check out. It’ll just help you make stuff go viral.

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The Great Debate: Digital Vs Traditional Marketing

The Great Debate: Digital Marketing vs The Letter Box DropI attended a Sydney Marketing function in June this year held by the popular Real Estate platform, RateMyAgent, and led by CEO, Mark Armstrong. His presentation was aimed at addressing the evolution of communication with an audience based on how quickly the commercial environment is changing today. This is both a relevant and tough debate, indeed!While this event was Real Estate specific, it is a topical discussion being held across every industry and every market around the world in all boardrooms and strategy meetings: digital vs traditional marketing.Where do we spend our precious budget to get the most cut through to engage our audiences and achieve our organisational goals?So, it’s finally time to analyse both sides and get to the bottom of this debate.Where Are Our Customers?Effective Marketing is all about your audience. This is never up for dispute as we all know it to be true. Knowing that, it may be time to take a step back and consider that age old question: have we thought about our customer?Recent research shows that 87% of consumers now search online for reviews to determine the quality of a local business, and I’m sure that statistic is pretty similar for how people are researching product information too. This is a big shift in behaviour from only a couple of years ago. Organisations didn’t start this- consumers did. We did. We, as people, changed the game, and organisations today are hugely naïve if they don’t think people are already doing most of their research before even contacting your business.As An ExampleMark Armstrong said his son needed an internet router for his house the other day, and at first, he had no clue what a router even was. In about ten minutes online, he become a pro with all of the brands, prices and specifications, then went straight into a local store, went to the shelf and purchased it without speaking to anyone in store.This is very indicative of the modern customer.The Digital InterviewToday, it’s all about ‘the digital interview’- in other words, searching online to find more information about a person or business without actually contacting them. Online dating, LinkedIn, Facebook, websites- it’s all about research before meeting in person. Around 70% of customers make up their mind before that stage, which is something businesses need to accept and adapt to.While statistics are always fickle, all you need to do is think about your own customer’s behaviour, and you instantly know this to be true. Hardly ever does a customer go in unprepared or uninformed.They’re All OnlineHow often do we go to a bar or a restaurant, and find everyone looking at a screen? It’s a sad reality, but a reality none the less. That is where your customer is! On their digital device.People aren’t looking for reviews and information in your physical office or in your marketing collateral – they are looking online. So, being there for your audience is absolutely crucial for your business success.
It’s all about your audience, after all.The Three Arguments: Digital vs Traditional MarketingThere are the three main considerations when deciding the pros and cons of new digital marketing versus more traditional methods, like the letter box drop or print.(1) Cost
(2) Effectiveness
(3) AccountabilityCOSTAs a general rule, more traditional methods tend to be far more costly in so many ways. It’s expensive to design, print and physically deliver materials like these. Now look at digital methods: it’s almost instant, requires little design due to templates, and the reach is not physically limited, meaning you can get ten times the exposure for around one-tenth of the cost.They seem to be light years apart on the cost front.For example, a client came to me recently and told me that the only advertising he was doing was on the back of local shopper dockets, which wasn’t giving him any tangible results, but was still costing him a few hundred dollars a month. For a fraction of this cost, I put his adverts onto Facebook and Google, and he immediately noticed the difference in leads generated!EFFECTIVENESSHow long do letterbox drops, print media and even mainstream advertising last?
Think about a letterbox specifically. The printed material sits in an office, then in a mail box all day. Then, when your audience gets home, are they truly engaged when they check their letterbox, stumbling in from work? They are coming home with the shopping, or wrangling the kids. This material has literally one second to capture them in amongst the rest of the clutter, and is so easy to ignore. That’s not to say it doesn’t occasionally work, but the chance of engagement is very low.Now, consider digital ads. It stays online for a much longer time, and due to the customisable nature of online targeting, it can pop up when the customer is more engaged and in the right headspace. It meets them on their terms, like when they are on their phone killing time, or browsing on a website, and so on. They can also interact with it by clicking on it, watching it, zooming in on it, saving it and much more.In comparison, think about when you hear a radio ad or see a TV ad: you have to remember and recall the advert at a later time for it to have any impact. This means your audience has to spend the effort to remember to act on it at a later time when it’s more relevant, such as when they get out of the car. Making this worse today is that we are constantly bombarded by ads and messages, which means that it’s very hard to keep one specific advert in your mind. You can’t rely on your customer recalling the message – you need to make it easy and at their fingertips.Digitally, your customer can fully interact at the very point they experience the piece of content, meaning engagement is far greater.ACCOUNTABILITYWhich technique truly works? What really has cut through and metrics to measure it? If you ask most organisations who spend budget yearly on letterbox drops, for example, they will say things like “$50,000 a year”, and then if you ask them “does this work?”, all they do is shrug their shoulders.The problem is, some businesses get into a rut of “it’s how we’ve always done it.” This represents a concerning shortfall in our perspective and our priorities. Our industries are too tough and our competitors too smart for us to be thinking this way anymore.On the digital marketing side, with retarget marketing and tracking cookies, online communication and adverts are able to serve up your communication to more defined and far better aligned demographics. Your adverts are more intelligent because they learn about the behaviour of your audience and adapt to how they consume content, then works out where and when to best display your marketing.The Three Battlegrounds of MarketingFrom the 1960ies, there has been an evolution of Marketing and communication battlegrounds based on how we built our customer database.(1) The Physical AddressOrganisations clambered to obtain the physical addresses of customers to communicate with them physically, either with a sales person, door knocking or letter box communications.(2) The Email AddressNext, emails went through an effective stage and businesses rushed to fill their databases with everyone’s @.com address. However today, we have found this to be far less effective do the quantity of spam everyone receives daily.(3) The Computer AddressPeople live on their mobiles and tablets now- this is where they are today. The battlefield has become exposure based on IP address online. Building a database of tracking cookies has become the Marketing battleground of today.While these IP addresses are kept private due to Privacy Laws and you never get the actual details, it doesn’t matter as you can rest assured that this technology is getting your message in front of the right people. Then tracking success comes from the metrics and analytics behind these interactions.
The core essence of Marketing hasn’t changed across any of the above battlegrounds: it’s always been about reaching your audience. The only thing that has changes is how- and this is a direct result from how the marketplace and consumer behaviour is evolving.What is it about Digital Marketing then?Digital Marketing is effective because it is customisable. It can target specific demographics to ensure that the best audience is getting your adverts and content at the right times.The following are three combined ways of how digital marketing finds your audience.(1) LocationGoogle tags computers with a geographical location. While letterbox drops can do the same, location is where the comparison ends. Digital is able to combine location with the following two qualifiers to ensure that your message is tailored, rather than mass distributed to just anyone.For example, in the Real Estate industry, around 70% of residences are investor controlled, which means letterbox drops are ineffective because the people receiving the materials are not the decision makers and therefore not finding themselves in the hands of the right people. Digital equivalents would use location and the following two to ensure it is being fed to the right customers.(2) Browsing HistoryIt is the fact above that allows digital marketing to take it one step further. The history of your browser paints a picture of the type of person your customer is and their interests, which means that adverts can be served up to match this. It’s not a perfectly accurate science, however due to the cost effectiveness of digital marketing, it has a far better cut through and success rate.(3) Remarketing and Tracking CookiesAs you move from website to website, tracking cookies embed themselves into your web browser to allow the content be catered specifically to you, so you are not receiving irrelevant messages. This allows advertising content to be shown to a relevant audience rather than just anyone.Where is Marketing Heading Next?Given that digital marketing is following around your ideal customer and delivering them relevant content, it seems to be working effectively at the moment. However, if I know Marketing the way I think I do, the next stage will be empathetic retarget marketing, which means showing the advert not just anywhere on any website, but when the person is browsing material that is contextually relevant.For example, when your customer, who has already been identified as interested in Real Estate, reaches a Real Estate or property website, the ad will be displayed, as opposed to how it is now, where it comes up on any website they may be looking at.It’s all about being in front of the right customer when they are in the right frame of mind.

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California Health Insurance – Independent Health Life Agent Verses Insurance Company In House Agent

You have just completed an online form requesting a free health insurance quote and moments later you are being inundated with phone calls from insurance agents hoping to get your business. Try not to become overwhelmed or annoyed by these “pesky sales people” because they are really not telemarketers. Most of them are well-trained state licensed professionals who can really help you make a good decision regarding which health plan is best and most affordable for your individual or group coverage needs.You may be under the misconception that if you buy your health plan directly from the insurance company, and cut out the “middle person”, you will save money. This is absolutely not the case. In fact, insurance companies rely on agents for most of their business and that’s why they pay them commissions for bringing in customers. It does not cost a consumer one penny more to use a licensed California health insurance agent to obtain their insurance coverage.There are many differences between California health insurance and other states including how it is applied for.For example, while Blue Cross and Blue Shield are one company in other states, here in California, each is separate and applied to individually as Anthem Blue Cross of California and Blue Shield of California.California health insurance law AB 1672 is an improvement over the federal HIPAA law that covers all states in that it includes the following with regard to California group coverage:1. Individuals with pre-existing medical conditions may change over to a new group health plan without an exclusionary period.2. It allows small businesses and professional organizations to have access to health plans providing they have between 2 and 50 full time employees.3. It keeps insurance rates from climbing after a claim is filed.4. Employees who have health problems may change jobs or health plans without being rated higher for having pre-existing conditions.That said, the very best health insurance agent for your individual and business needs is an “Independent Agent.” Why? Because they represent multiple insurance carriers, not just one. An independent agent can help you select the most appropriate cost-effective plan offering the most benefits for your dollar as available from the major carriers, rather than feeding you just one company’s line of health plans which may not suit your particular needs. Many people are too complacent and settle for what their current insurance company has to offer. They could use a good independent agent to sort through the many plans available from multiple insurance carriers to find and provide the best choice of options.Another misunderstanding you may have is that insurance agents set the premium rates for the health insurance plans they sell. Thinking if you shop around you may get a better price for the same plan. Premium rates are based on your age, zip code or county in which you reside and are controlled completely by the insurance companies. Every agent uses the exact same rate guides set by the insurance companies. The condition of your health may affect your premium, which may be rated up after the insurance company’s underwriting department has reviewed your medical records. Again, the insurance company, not the agent, determines that outcome.Now, let’s talk about the benefits of having a good insurance agent representing you. Most consumers neither know nor understand the benefits of a health plan being offered and need the expertise of an agent to explain the benefits to them in full. For example, do you know what the difference is between an “out-of-pocket maximum” and an “annual deductible?”An out of pocket maximum is the most you will have to pay in a given year for deductible and coinsurance for covered benefits before your insurance starts to pay 100% of most expenses until the year ends.An annual deductible is usually the amount you pay each year before your health plan starts paying anything for covered services. Generally, the higher the deductible, the lower the premium. Certain services such as prescription drugs carry separate deductibles. Plans may vary and sometimes benefits will kick in before you have to meet the deductible.A knowledgeable health insurance agent can be a guide through the maze and help you choose the right plan to meet your needs and budget while obtaining the most benefits for your dollars spent. An agent will also make clear how the benefits for a generic prescription may differ from the benefits for a brand prescription on a particular plan.After you have a health plan in place, a good, caring agent will remind you to pay your premium on time so the insurance company doesn’t cancel you. Your agent can also be an enormous resource for assistance if you run into a problem with a health insurance claim. Instead of waiting on hold at the insurance company’s 800 number for thirty to forty- five minutes, call your agent and explain your problem and if you have chosen the right agent, you will get help and may save yourself lots of time and frustration, maybe even some money by having an expert in your corner where your best interests come first.So next time you or someone you know, fills out one of those on-line forms for a health insurance quote and you get several phone calls from health insurance agents wanting your business, be grateful that a professional wants to help you for free to choose the right plan and you’ll have an important friend for life.

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