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.