If you are an influencer, wear it like a badge of pride. You are making other people around the world happier. You are influencing their lives directly every time you release a video. Being an influencer is one of the most rewarding careers that anyone can ever have. You are doing a ton of good for your audience. You entertain them, you inspire them, you motivate them and move them to live better lives.

Being an influencer doesn’t mean going viral, it means building up a personal brand that people trust. As an influencer, you are the person that they are going to look to for entertainment, advice and inspiration. You need to be their trusted advisor.

Getting millions of views is meaningless if your audience doesn’t trust you. Apart from trust, the second part of the equation for becoming an influencer is your views count, and subscribers count.

When you think about YouTube influencer, you usually think about people who have millions and millions of views. But, that is wrong. It’s nice to have an insane view count, but what’s more important is that the right people are watching your videos.

When you start creating shareable content, your goal is not for the whole world to see it. Your goal is to maximize the number of people in your target audience that are exposed to your ideas. For example: If you’re creating arts and crafts channel dedicated to vintage fashion and dressmaking, you want all aucasinosonline.com/nz/ the people obsessed to vintage fashion to find you.

Remember: Having a smaller crowd that is hungry for what you’re offering is better than having a big crowd that isn’t interested what you have to offer. This is simply because you’ll make more money out of them.

1. The Copy and Innovate Strategy

The difference between an influencer who has average results vs. influencer with massive viral video marketing success is innovation. Average influencers don’t innovate, they look at other successful YouTube channels in their niche and copy exactly what they see. Successful ones innovate.

Innovation is the epitome of creativity. It is a necessary part of developing a killer content strategy. Being innovative doesn’t mean you need to be 100% original. Originality is not necessarily innovation. The greatest innovation comes from taking the best elements of ideas that have already been done and combining them in a way that has never been seen before.

“Nothing is original. Everything is a remix. From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, our most celebrated creators borrow, steal and transform.” The key to remixing is adding your own unique twist to the concepts that have already been proven.

How Exactly Do You Copy and Improve?

There are several ways you can succeed with this strategy.

Immerse then Innovate

The best way to learn viral content is to immerse yourself in what is currently working. Research, analyze and break down their content until you understand why it is successful. Research the creators that get the most attention in their niche. Figure out why. Don’t just speculate. Look at their video comments and what their audience say they love about their content.

When done researching, you are going to innovate. You figure out what works and why. How can you make an idea better, unique and make the idea yours? Spend time on these and better analyze your competitions.

Look Outside Your Industry for Inspiration

If you stay inside your niche while researching, you will only be seeing a limited scope of possibilities. Research outside your market. Look at the leaders in totally different niches. What makes them successful? Why their audiences enjoy their contents so much?

As a content creator, you have to innovate if you want to be better than average. Learn how to remix the right way, and you’ll be generating ideas and great viral content.

  2. The Inform + Entertain Strategy

The secret to creating a successful viral video marketing or teaching your audience is Infotainment. Informing plus entertaining refers to the content that teaches your audience something while also being extremely entertaining.

There are two types of people who create teaching based channels on YouTube:

• People that use the same formula – These people are the ones who gain master followers. They are the ones who have audiences that are literally addicted to them. Their audiences are addicted to them because they are fun to learn from.
• People that don’t use this formula – These people end up smashing their head against the wall for frustration because they can’t figure out why their audiences are growing and why they can’t seem to get more subscribers.

This strategy is about mixing teaching with eliciting emotions. When done correctly, this combination is more likely result in viral content for it has all the necessary ingredients for going viral. Eliciting emotions is one of the keys. It doesn’t matter what the emotion is, as long as you are eliciting some type of emotions from your viewer.

This is the act of making learning so fun that it doesn’t even seem like work. If you create content and incorporate entertainment, four amazing things will happen. They are;

• Higher Sharing Potential – The chances of your content being shared becomes much higher.
• Greater Audience Impact – The things you are trying to teach are more likely to be digested, remembered and implemented. This simply means you have a greater impact on your audience.
• Massive Audience – You create a massive audience of devoted fans.
• New Audience – This strategy makes any subject intriguing. So you’ll be able to get people interested in you who otherwise wouldn’t give you any attention.

You don’t need to have some crazy personality to create this type of content. You just need to add an extra layer on top of the information you presented. That layer could be humor, inspiration, intrigues, stories or anything that isn’t just pure information.

Don’t forget information alone is boring. Nobody wants that. Find a way to make your content emotional, personal, inspiring, motivational, anything that can bring emotion out of your audience.

Creating Engaging Content

Succeeding in viral video marketing is pretty simple if you have the right ideas.

Well, some of the important considerations that ascertain a successful content include:

Strong Hook

This is specifically within the first 15 seconds of your video. Most people will click away from your video if they are not hooked immediately. Remember, this is social media, not a movie. For the most part, people are not willing to sit to something that has a slow build up especially if they don’t know you.

If you already have a big audience, you can get away with more, but if you don’t, you need to make sure that the first 15 seconds will hook someone who has never even heard of you before. A really great hook makes a viewer feel like they absolutely have to keep watching.

To make a strong hook;

• Put the best clip first
• Open your video with an intriguing question or prompt
• Cut the fat out of your intro, so you quickly get to the point.

Eliciting an Emotion

The golden rule of viral video marketing is to elicit an emotional response. This doesn’t apply to videos only but applies to all content. The best videos elicit emotion from you, happiness, sadness, anger, nostalgia, hope laughter, inspiration and much more.

As you create content, ask yourself, what do I want my audience to feel? Getting your audience to experience emotion isn’t luck, there a science to doing it effectively.

This is critical as you need to elicit some sort of strong emotions from your viewers. It doesn’t matter what the emotion is. The worst thing you could do is have your viewers’ reaction be “meh” by the end of your video.

Top 3 Ways To Elicit Emotions From Your Audience

Challenge Assumptions

The power of challenging assumptions lies in shocking your viewers into wondering if they’ve been thinking something the wrong way all along. When your viewers’ assumptions are challenged like these, they feel the need to share the experience with their friends who’ll be just as surprised as they are.

Have a Unique Perspective

People tune out things they’ve seen a million times before. There’s a subconscious phenomenon called “Banner Blindness” – a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information.

Having a unique perspective isn’t as difficult as it sounds, you just need to explain your message in a way that isn’t immediately obvious. When it comes to having a unique perspective don’t be afraid to get weird. The internet likes weird.

Tell a Story

Stories plant ideas, emotions, thoughts, and lessons in us. Stories are how we think and process the world. Stories bring us together in ways that share our common experiences, and for that reason, they are very powerful. To connect with people, you tell a story.

These traits elicit emotions, challenge emotions and you will hook people. Have a unique perspective, and people will give you their attention. Tell a story, and you will plant people’s basic desire to connect with others. Incorporating these traits results in increased shares and views.

Having a Clickable Title and Thumbnail

This is the number one most overlooked issue but is the easiest to fix. You should present your video in the most intriguing light to get someone to click.

Good title VS Bad Title:

Kel’s Puppy Surprise – Terrible title as no one knows who Kel is. It wouldn’t elicit emotions, and it’s totally unrelatable. This video did not get many views.

Renamed it to:

Surprising a Co-worker with a Puppy – A much better title as it’s relatable, pretty much everyone has a coworker and they can all imagine what it would be like to surprise one with a puppy.

As for the Thumbnail, simply choose the most intriguing part from your video. It’s very subjective and hard to get it right. But the good news is your thumbnail generally isn’t as important as your video title. Your thumbnail simply adds an additional layer of intrigue.

Asking yourself a question, “Will this attract a new audience?”

This question is so important. Often times, new content creators will make videos as if they already have a huge audience of adoring fans. So you’ll see them do things like “draw my life videos” or title their videos super obscurely- essentially doing things that they could get away with it if they have a huge audience.

They are doing this because they are simply following people with million subscribers thinking they are doing it so they should do it too. The truth is they can get away with it since they already have a huge audience, unlike new content creators.

When you are first starting out, you need to cater your content towards attracting a new audience. Why would you create an “a draw my life’ video if you don’t have an audience that is attached enough to you to care about your life in the first place?

How to Think Big

Viral video marketing success requires that you think big. There are two ways to approach a roadblock. Either approach it as a source of frustration or an opportunity to Learn. Always find joy in the journey. See challenges as chances to learn, to improve and even to have fun. You cannot succeed until you adopt this mindset.

When you find joy in your journey, you enjoy creating content for the sake of creating content without being pinned down by whether or not you will succeed. You constantly experiment with new ideas even if they fail because you like doing it. Moreover, always have fun and remain optimistic every step of the way.

People with the wrong version of this mindset are fighting an uphill battle. All they want is the money or success. That makes them impossible to enjoy putting the hard work that is required to accomplish these goals. You’ll never get what you want or be happy if you judge yourself by success only.

The most successful people in any area are the ones who enjoy the journey of chasing success rather than just wanting the end result. More than anything, the mindset will determine whether you ultimately succeed or fail at creating a successful channel. If you want to succeed, you must find joy in the journey.

Creating content is hard. It is different from anything else you’ve probably done in your life. Content is an art, and in order to consistently create shareable and viral content, you need to go through numerous versions of your ideas before you hit on the one the really works.

It is the concept of thinking big. Thinking big is the offset that most people do. Most people think that it is easier to think small and make safe decisions. They are afraid of failure, and the fear makes them end up doing exactly what they are trying to avoid. That is why you see many people making boring content.

That’s the mindset of people thinking small. They are afraid to be controversial. They are afraid for the potential downside. By not thinking big, they won’t stand out. They won’t get the result they are after. Big wins don’t come from people who think small. You need to take risks and try to innovate on ideas that might fail.

Those who think small think that they have more likely small success. They are crippling themselves and their success without even knowing it. Thinking small is silly, and you should never do it. Instead, look at what your competitors are doing and ask yourself “what can i do to make my content 100X better than theirs. That’s the kind of thinking that will help you massively successful.

Thinking big is trying to hit a million views of your video, but not just trying but planning and working to make that happen. If you think small, you’ll stay small; if you think big, you can grow your business and brand as big as you want.

Final Thoughts

Succeeding in your viral video marketing requires that you consider the above-outlined strategies. However, you need to ensure that your content is good enough to go viral. Remember, failures are part of the process.

You absolutely have to experience a lot of failures in order to learn to succeed. Facing an obstacle is a good thing. Keep a positive attitude and view each failure as an opportunity to learn something new.