Would you like your videos to hit a million views?
Or maybe 10 million or more?
While there is no exact science to creating a video that will be viewed millions of times, there is a method that greatly increases your odds.
No doubt you’ve heard that if you want to do something, you should find someone else who has already done it, and then do what they did.
This method works a lot like that, except of course we’re never going to duplicate content.
But we will investigate to find out what videos have insanely high spikes in viewership, and why it’s happening so that we might be able to do the same thing ourselves.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s say you’re in the dog training niche. You have your own YouTube dog training channel where you pump out dog training videos and promote your own dog training products.
You’re creating a video a week and each of your videos typically gets 10K views in the first week.
But then you get a spike. A BIG spike. Your latest video gets 100K views in its first week, which is a 1,000% spike.
At the same time, you also monitor your competition, watching other dog training channels to see how their videos perform.
Every week or so you check these channels and look for spikes in viewership.
For example, dog training channel X gets an average view count of 5K or 7K views in the first week. But then you notice their latest video has 150K views, even though they only have 10K subscribers. Obviously, something notable is going on with that video.
Your job is to figure out the reason these videos (yours and your competitor’s) have spiked. When you discover this, you’re going to use this information on your future videos to increase the chances that they will spike as well.
What makes a video spike?
It could be any of the following, a combination of these, or even another variable:
- Primary keyword(s) or topic
- The secondary keyword(s) or topics
- The title itself
- The thumbnail image
- Piggybacking on a successful video (it’s acting like a sequel to a super successful video which may or may not be from the same channel)
- Something within the video, such as content, structure, a surprising element, etc.
In the case of a video viewing spike on a channel with low subscribers, the answer is usually that the topic is something YouTube wishes to promote, and this particular video is chosen by YouTube to be a good representation of that topic.
If the video has a good impression to view ratio, watch time, retention and so forth (viewing metrics) that can be enough to convince YouTube to send plenty of traffic to the video.
Take as much time as you need to really pour over the videos that spike and figure out what’s happening.
Is it the topic?
A tag?
The title, or a particular word in the title?
Did it get shared someplace with lots of traffic? (Such as Reddit)
Is it piggybacking a popular video? Which one?
Is this a micro-niche that needs to be filled?
How is the video structured?
What happens in the first few seconds?
What grabs the viewer?
What keeps them watching?
Do the comments provide a clue?
Your job is to learn why these videos spike and then try to replicate the spikes by emulating, not copying.
Because we don’t know exactly how YouTube makes decisions on what videos to feature, and because you never know exactly what people will want, this is not an exact science (not even close.)
But as you spend more and more time dissecting spiking videos, you’ll learn what elements to use in your own videos to increase (sometimes GREATLY increase) the odds that they, too, receive huge spikes of traffic.
One last thing for people who don’t use videos in their marketing (yet): It’s entirely possible to sell $10K – $50K of a product – such as a course – from a single video with a huge viewership spike.
Food for thought.
