How to Plan Ahead While Creating Viral Videos

Filming a video is easy: have an idea, get a camera and have people act it out. What’s hard is creating a viral video, one which rapidly spreads across the Internet, or which is loved by your target audience.

To create your viral video you will need to be you’re checking off several key points before you ever even upload it to YouTube.

Look through this list, compare it to what you’re doing, and make sure that your plan is ready.

At the end of the article I’ll show an example of an excellent viral video that hits these points perfectly!

Plan Ahead to Create a Viral Video

Have a reason for your viral video existing

Make sure that your viral video will be useful to those who already follow you, while drawing in those who you want to bring in.

A serious videolog from a scientific company may draw in a few new viewers with a video that makes them laugh, but it could very easily annoy those viewers who are already with you.

You need those who are already on your side to support you and begin spreading the video, you can not alienate them! Your core followers are likely going to be there for you after the video makes a few waves, don’t push them away for a momentary gain.

Get to know crowd influencers

The concept of crowd marketing looks at having a number of crowd influencers on your side. These crowd influencers are people who already have an engaged audience. Those who are within your niche are ones which you’ll want to speak with.

You can read more about crowd marketing tactics at the link, but the basics are:

• Crowd influencers are able to help you spread your message rapidly through their audience.
• Taking the time to look at their audience can help you discover further content that they’ll respond to.
• Make sure that you’re in contact with the crowd influencer and that they will spread your message with a share

For bonus points, send a link to the crowd influencer that you can track for them specifically. A Link URL shortener service will commonly have a way to track that specific link sent to the crowd influencer.

Excellent examples of this include Bit.ly and Hootsuite’s Ow.ly.

Make your viral video easy to share and connect with

The obvious step is to upload your video to every social media account you have, but we’re going to look past that and talk about YouTube Channel Gallery.

This is a Wordpress plugin that shows a thumbnail image of your videos, connecting your content together on your webpage or blog built in Wordpress.

This is going to help you connect your videos across platforms – living on an island over on YouTube will not help you truly spread your message.

Reward your current subscribers for sharing your video

Rewards for YouTube videos vary. An example for could be “If this video reaches 100,000 views we’ll offer a X% discount.”

Other calls to action for rewards would include sayings like “Get us over 50,000 subscribers and we’ll show you the behind the scenes footage,” “Our manager promises to give our first 10 customers a free XXX if this video goes over 10,000 views today.”

The idea is to take the video offline and give it real world rewards. You can think of it as an extension of your current in-store specials and budget accordingly.

Have a long term plan for your viral video

This, of course, is them sot important aspect of your viral video. Creating a video that 100,00 people see is meaningless if there’s no long term plan involved. For instance, does your viral video have:

1. A message in it that captures new subscribers?
2. Any content that directs people to your website or landing pages?
3. Some sort of connection to your other videos so people watch other videos on your channel?

Planning ahead can help you achieve all of these goals. The most successful YouTube users all take the time to ask, either by text onscreen or by verbal cues, for people to subscribe to their channel. They will have links in the description that go to their website, a will again have onscreen and verbal mentions.

Lastly, the most successful YouTube subscribers always have a consistent host and message, so that when people find that hit viral video they’ll easily slip into watching your other video’s

A Viral Video Example

For you, a business looking to market your products via YouTube videos, you need to work a bit harder than those accidental viral videos. Take a look at the video below and see:

• How they connect the video to past examples, and even use the same host and premise.
• The “Click here to Subscribe buttons at around the 3:30 mark where the video gets good.
• The brand makes appearances, but they incidental and not like a typical commercial.
• They found an excellent viral influencer (Jeff Gordon) within their target market for this specific video series.

None of this happened by accident. While you may not be able to afford Jeff Gordon, you can still put this on a scale that meets your needs and drives new viewers to your channel.

Check out this video to have some fun, and see how all this above can be done: