List Auction is a safelist advertising membership program created and run by successful internet marketer Michael Purvis. I have never used this service and heard that many people have found success using it. If anyone has used this service, please contact me or post a comment to let me know if it worked for you. Here’s a video intro to http://www.thelistauction.com.
I am always looking for new traffic strategies. If there are any unique traffic strategies that you’d like to share also, please feel free to do so here.
Have you ever wondered how some people manage to create a video from their kitchen table, upload it to Youtube, and vuala… over 1,000,000 views in a short period of time? Was it a fluke? Is there some secret formula for getting so many views on a Youtube video?
The question is, what really makes a Youtube video go viral? Some videos become so popular that the author of the video ends up with a movie deal, a record deal, etc. That doesn’t happen too often though. However, Youtube video marketing can get you lots of viewers, which can drive a boatload of traffic to your site when done the right way.
Google has a love affair with Youtube and Youtube videos tend to show up in the search engine quickly. Once you have your video uploaded on Youtube, you must have a link back to your website on the top right side, next to your video (below the subscribe button). You also need to have your website link showing at the beginning and end of the video.
Is There A Secret Formula?
Is there really some type of secret formula that can get you thousands or even millions of hits over a short period of time? Well I’ve questioned that many times and it baffled me how some videos, like the “Charlie Bit My Finger–Again,” video, received so many views.
Now take a look at the “Charlie Bit My Finger–Again,” video below. Again, this video received over 164 million views. What do you think? Is it that funny? This was one of those videos that went viral and no one seems to really know why it’s the most viewed video on Youtube ever.
I love this video, but seriously, I’ve seen hundreds of videos much funnier. Anyway, that’s just my opinion. Take a look:
Funny, Shocking, And Sexy
Well I hope you enjoyed the video, especially if you never saw it before. Now what is my point here? Well, if you want to get Youtube viewers attention, your video needs to fit in either one of these three following categories… funy, shocking, or of a sexual nature. When I say sexual, I mean for example, a thumbnail of a woman in a bikini (see example video thumbnail a couple videos below).
I’m not saying that videos in other categories do not receive hundreds of thousands of views or even millions, but it’s just that these three categories top the list. If you really look around Youtube you will see that the videos with the highest views pretty much fit into those categories. Below is an example of a shocking video.
The author of that video earned thousands of dollars from that video. It received over 400,000 views.
The author of the video linked the video to a company offering car insurance. He was an affiliate of that product and received a commission whenever anyone filled out there name on a form to get a car insurance quote. So he didn’t have to sell anything. Awesome, isn’t it? This is how it works.
Now let’s get back to the “Charlie” video. Personally, I think that the video below is funnier than the Charlie video. It had me in stitches. This video is in fourth place for the top 10 most viewed Youtube videos of all time. It’s hilarious. Again, this is only my opinion. See below.
Tips And Tricks To Increasing Video Views
So now let me get to the point here. There is no specific formula that you can follow to a tee and get over a million views on Youtube. However, there are several things you can do to increase your chances.
As I mentioned previously, the video needs to fit in the comedy, shock, or sex categories. Second of all, you must have a “killer” keyword targeted, headline, one that would make people want to click on the video to view it.
Do some keyword research before hand and then search that keyword via youtube and see how many veiws the top video has. This way you know what you are working with. What some people actually do is steal the tags and description from the top viewed videos in order to increase their chances of getting many views like their competition.
Great Headlines
Another thing people do is create misleading headlines. I actually get annoyed when people put up misleading headlines to get lots of views like the one below. The video below is cute, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the headline. I hate being misled. Take a look at the video below to see exactly what I’m talking about.
Hot, Sexy Thumbnails
Another trick to getting lots of views is to set up your thumbnail to peak people’s interest. The thumbnail is the image from the video that people see whenever your video is displayed in the Youtube listings.
The thumbnail is actually the part of the video that most people pay attention to. There’s one problem though. Youtube actually chooses your thumbnail. You have a choice of three thumbnails that Youtube creates for you to choose from.
I’ve submitted videos, and the thumbnails that Youtube chose that were completely unrelated to the part of the videos that I wanted to emphasize. I’ve always wondered why Youtube never gives the video author the option to chose what part of the video should be the thumbnail. Well, there is actually a way to get the thumbnail of your choice. However, some math is involved (multiplication). So if you got an “F” in math, you would have a problem here. He he…
It’s Time To Calculate
Here’s what I do now. In order to calculate your three thumbnails, you must take the amount of minutes of your video and multiply them by three different variables (.25, .50, .75).
For example, if you have a one-minute video (60 seconds), your three thumbnails would fall at 15 seconds (60x.25), 30 seconds (60x.50), and 45 seconds (60x.75). Take a look at the thumbnail below and look at the entire video to see how the video author was able to cleverly set up such a sexy thumbnail from such a “dark” video.
One Last Tip
I have one more tip that I want to share with you. I stumbled upon this technique and I implemented it. I will share exactly what I did below. First let me describe a little about the video that I used to test this tip.
I created a Youtube Channel and a blog for my sister and just threw a video together. It was one of those experimental videos that I created, uploaded to Youtube and forgot all about it. My sister did too.
My sister never bothered with that blog that I created for her, or the Youtube channel. As a matter of fact the channel is completely dead… no activity for months. I just checked Youtube and saw that the channel has four subscribers… suprised. It also seemed like the video was embedded in multiple blogs because the page rank of the blog went from a PR 0 to a PR 4.
Boring As Hell
What surprised me was that my video didn’t fit into the comedy, shock, or sex category. As a matter of fact it was a tutorial…informative, but boring as hell. However, it got the message across and some extra traffic came along with that too. It wasn’t a whole lot of traffic, but I’m showing you how a neglected video received over 1,500 views. The video tutorial is entitled, “How To Have Soft, Plump Lips.”
Want to know what I did? Well here’s what I did. I looked for a video (The Perfect Red Lips Tutorial) with over 100,000 views. The video is in a similar category of my (lip plumping) video.
I then post a video response to “The perfect red lips tutorial,” video. My video response was once in the top 4 video lineup under the video with the Red Lip Tutorial video for probably no more than a couple days.
This was because, as time went on, other people posted video responses and pushed my video further down the “Totem pole.” The views also went down the drain as more people added video responses. Here’s the video that I’m talking about:
The whole concept here is to get people to watch your video after they’ve finished watching the original video (The Perfect Red Lip Tutorial for example). Your main goal should be to get your video response showing up in the top four spots along with the other video responses. You want to make sure that your video is on display right before your viewers eyes.
Don’t Get Lost In The Shuffle
Here is what you can do as more and more people post video responses, and your video gets lost in the shuffle. You can then add that same video as a response to another high traffic video in the same niche market. Don’t do like I did and upload a video and forget about it. Market the living daylights out of that video.
So go ahead… create your funny, shocking, or sexy video, and send a boatload of highly targeted, free traffic to your blog or website. Make sure that you are careful with sexy videos because Youtube will shut you down if that video is too “Raw.” Make sure you read the policies, terms, and services in order to abide by Youtube’s guideline.
