What if your YouTube channel was the next big thing? What if instead of a handful of views per video, or a few thousand, you saw hundreds of thousands or even millions of views? What if one or more of your videos went viral?
Think of how your business and life would change. Think of how many more potential customers you would have, how many new leads would be streaming in and how much more revenue you would have if your channel went viral.
When it comes to building your business, and leveraging YouTube, it pays to dream big. You have the vision for success, but how do you make it a reality?
What’s the key to going viral on YouTube?
If you’re staying up late into the night trying to figure out how to make your YouTube videos go viral, you’ve come to the right place.
The Power of YouTube
Even though YouTube has been around since basically the dawn of the Internet, it is still a super popular platform and effective way to reach people. Part of this is because of how easy it is to watch YouTube videos wherever you are on your smartphone. They’re easy to watch while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office, easy to watch on your computer while you’re taking a break from working and easy to watch on your big-screen TV at home.
And when it comes to online video content, Google pretty much has a monopoly with YouTube. So how do you tap into YouTube’s power and its massive audience to build your audience, grow your subscribers and go viral?
There isn’t a secret formula to automatically make one of your videos go viral overnight. But there are nine practical action steps you can take to improve the likelihood one or more of your videos takes off.
Benefits of Going Viral on YouTube
We probably don’t need to say this, but let’s take a quick look at the benefits of going viral on YouTube. And if you’re wondering, what is “viral” anyway, a viral video is one that reaches a significantly larger audience than usual, often in a short period of time.
So let’s say your average video normally gets about 1,000 views after the first couple weeks of being posted. One of your recent videos really resonated with people, a ton of people commented on it and shared it, and in just three days, it has 200,000 views. For you, this would be viral. It might not rival Mr. Beast’s most popular video (443 million views!), but it’s really good considering the size of your channel.
Here are just some of the benefits of going viral:
- Much larger brand awareness
- More followers and subscribers
- More potential customers for your business
- Your video and channel being shared across other social media platforms
- Opportunity to monetize your content through ad revenue, sponsored content, brand partnerships and merchandise sales (advertisers and brands are more likely to collaborate with and sponsor channels that are more popular)
- Increased community around your business or channel
- Media and press coverage
Now, let’s learn a few of the things you can do to go viral on YouTube and get a lot more views. And don’t worry. It doesn’t involve buying a $20,000 video camera for the latest HD quality.
9 Ways to Help YouTube Videos Go Viral
First, we have to stress that going viral is not guaranteed—no matter what you do to try to make it happen. And it also shouldn’t be the main focus for your YouTube channel.
You should also work on producing high-quality, consistent content that connects with people and solves their problems. This is the number one thing you can do to achieve long-term success with your channel, as opposed to trying to make one video go viral.
That said, here are nine tips to going viral and growing your views on YouTube. Even if you don’t truly “go viral,” what if you could increase your YouTube views by 2x, 5x or 10x? That would be worth it.
1. Understand Your Audience
Going viral involves knowing your audience. This is one of the first rules of public speaking and the same applies to YouTube videos. What do they like? What are they interested in? What types of content are they most likely to engage with? What would make them laugh, cry or say, “Wow, that’s really interesting.”
The best marketers and branding experts think hard about what their customers are really looking for. Focus on providing value, entertainment or solving a specific problem for your target audience. Understand their interests, preferences and demographics. Tailor your content to appeal to them, and use a tone and style that resonates with viewers.
The more you understand what motivates your audience, the higher the chances are that you will create videos that connect with them and ones they’ll want to share with others.
2. Lean Into Humor!
Lean into humor on your YouTube channel, where it’s appropriate. Don’t be afraid to try some funny or off-the-wall things on your channel and see how they perform.
Go watch some of Ryan Reynolds ads where he is talking about his Aviation gin company or other products he’s involved with. Ryan Reynolds has now become known for using his humor in branding and marketing campaigns and people love it! This is because he’s funny. He takes new and unique approaches to topics and makes us laugh.
Let’s say you run a local barbershop. You’re using a combination of Facebook and Google ads along with a brand-new YouTube channel. Instead of posting videos of your hours and location, or other dry information about your business or its history, come up with some funny videos that people would enjoy watching. Maybe ask if one of your most interesting customers would agree to be filmed during a haircut to give people a peek into how much fun your shop is.
Brainstorm with others to find new and creative ways to get your message out there. Create content that stands out from the crowd. Who knows? One of those videos just might end up going viral and bringing in a lot more customers and subscribers.
3. Video Titles and Thumbnails
We cannot emphasize this enough. Your video titles and thumbnails matter! The Internet is a very noisy and crowded place. People are distracted constantly, scrolling through social media, flipping channels on the TV, watching different streaming services. You need to make sure your video titles are catchy. That they describe what the video is about in the most attention-grabbing way.
And your thumbnails need to be as visually interesting as possible. They should pique people’s curiosity and be eye-catching. They should make people want to click!
4. Optimize Video Descriptions and Tags
This next one might feel a little boring, but it’s still an important part of setting your videos up for success and potentially going viral.
Make sure you write detailed and keyword-rich video descriptions that outline the content and include relevant links. Be sure to use tags that are relevant to your video to help YouTube’s algorithm understand the context and improve discoverability. After all, if YouTube can’t find your videos through the proper keywords and tags, it won’t be able to recommend them to users.
And don’t forget to use YouTube’s features like end screens, info cards, chapters and annotations to guide viewers to other relevant videos on your channel. This will increase watch time and overall engagement.
5. Cross-Platform Posting and Collaborating
Another thing that can be a factor in whether your video goes viral is sharing it across multiple social media platforms. Obviously, different people use different social media apps. And your goal is to reach the widest audience possible. This means you can’t simply post it on YouTube and expect that everyone will find it. You need to also share it on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.
You can also engage with communities on websites like Reddit to bring people to your channel. Or embed your video on relevant websites or blogs. At the end of the day, the more exposure your video gets, the higher the chance of it going viral.
You should also look into collaborating with more established YouTubers or influencers with a similar target audience. By featuring in each other’s videos or promoting each other’s content, you can tap into their existing fan base and expand your reach.
7. Stay Engaged
YouTube likes it when content creators stay engaged with their fan base. This means actively responding to comments and building your community of followers. Don’t miss this part.
Higher engagement on your videos will signal to YouTube that your video is valuable to people, potentially boosting its visibility.
8. Trending Topics
The Internet is all about the trends. Audio trends. Meme trends. News trends. Trends of all shapes and sizes.
Stay up to date with current trends, events and popular topics and you’ll have a lot better chance of going viral. Think of it like surfing. Riding an Internet trend is like catching that perfect wave. And once you’re riding the wave, everyone on the beach will be able to see you at the top of that board.
Going viral is similar. If you learn to catch trends and piggyback on them with your own content, it will only be a matter of time before you gain some viral traction and build up a lot more views.
9. Study Other YouTubers
Finally, it’s really important to spend time studying the most successful YouTubers like Mr. Beast, PewDiePie, Dude Perfect and Jake Paul. Listen to some of the interviews they’ve done explaining how and why they have been so popular. Take notes on their strategies and tactics and copy the things that make sense for your strategy. Look at the types of thumbnails, video titles and descriptions they use to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Now that you’ve learned more about how to increase YouTube views, create a checklist of these strategies above and start seeing how you can improve your videos to reach a wider audience. You’ve got this!
Need Support?
We know you have a ton of ideas and the vision to take your YouTube channel to the next level. But maybe you’re just looking for a little extra support.
That’s where we come in. We believe YouTube is one of the best ways businesses can grow their reach and drive sales. But YouTube can be tricky to get right. It’s not easy to know what to do, which types of videos to post, when to post them and how to create content on YouTube that will really move the needle for your business.
We provide done-for-you YouTube marketing so you can focus on the other areas of growing your business.
Book a free call today with our team to learn how we can help you grow your YouTube views, subscribers and revenue and truly tap into the power of YouTube.
