As I mentioned in my recent eBook (“How to Become Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent“), Obama-Girl creator Ben Relles taught me about the power of blogs to get a viral video to a tipping point. Candidly, I’m usually too lazy to go searching for blogs that might like a video, and kinda hope they’ll find it on their own. But Gizmodo (a very popular blog) recently posted about my “MacBook Air Obsessed With Thin.”
Back story: this short parody of a Mac ad (see original post) took about 20 minutes — from idea to upload. So I decided to invest another 5 Googling a few Mac blogs, and sending them the video’s URL. I had to move quick because the Ambien, at this point, was bringing me down like a tranquilized elephant with a dart hanging from his neck.
This paid off. I would have forgotten about my little self-promotion binge (I’m prone to “black outs” after my post-Ambien activities). But this morning I noticed the Mac parody had 40K views already, which far exceed my number of subscribers (27K) and what I’d normally get by being the 3rd-highest rated comedy of the day. Paranthetically, my antecdotal feebdack suggests the video has some innate viral elements because a) my wife liked it (rare), b) I got a call from my advertising agency about it, and c) the CEO from Xlntads sent me an e-mail about it.
Still, a little “blog gasoline” on the “viral spark” is well worth its time.
Is it working? Google your video’s unique title to see if there’s uptake. Also, 0n YouTube, you can select “links” under a video (it’s easy to miss), and see if any individual site is tossing a lot of traffic your way. I don’t usually notice a lot of activity here, but I do recall finding an Asian porn site throwing my “HappySlip on eBay” video a lot of views).
Today it shows that 12K of the 39k views were coming from Gizmodo. I couldn’t recall sending them the URL, but it appears they posted about the video and credited Cult of Mac (I suppose I had sent the video to Cult of Mac before Ambien shut me down completely). Oddly, Gizmodo reports 6000 people reading that post, but I’m seeing 12,000 coming to my video via Gizmodo. Huh? YouTube usually drastically under reports the inbound links.
Are you paying attention or glazing over this in an ADHD fog? Let me summarize with the “least you need to know”: if you do a video that has viral potential, find some bloggers who might be interested in the story.
Don’t spam bloggers, but send them a personalized, relevant note and connect the video to their readership so it doesn’t look too self pimpin’. And I wouldn’t advise this tactic unless you’re fairly confident they’ll get a chuckle over the clip. It also makes a big difference if you’re a regular reader of their blog and can demonstrate that. I’ll confess I wasn’t a regular reader of Cult of Mac, but now I’m hooked.
WARNING I DID NOT START THIS SPAM ok susie was going to a river where she watched the school of dogs dissecting cats that could fly because of their lung cancer thus enabling the time portal to pull down the trigger that made the lever go down into Narnia which was currently in a war against the Summer Queen who made eternal summer, when the summer queen was vanquished Fred came to save the day transporting all living babies in the world to travel first class to Funkytown singing Funkytowwwwwn the whole way there the babies enjoyed their sparkling white grape juice which made them all fart Beethovens Ninth backwards making them change each others pampers for a milenium until two magical beavers came and started to shop at wal-mart because of it having the lowest prices they bought firewood to burn the Ohio River therefore making Lisa Nova drinking an 8 ounce glass of water flexing her liver making it break thus powering all of new york city for the rest of the year making arnold schwargentator happy to be alive until the terminator kills him everyone is living happily except George Bush since lisa novas liver broke and two squirrels from sydney come in to kidnap president lincoln holding him as ransom for 70 nuts or walnuts making the world fall in the Great Depression 2 thus starting war against switzerland because of all of the obese people in america wanting it’s magical chocolate mines causing them to get more obese and starting weight watchers to gain even more weight causing the worlds rotation to end effecting into the sun being blocked by an enormous bottle sun tan lotion sold by an eskimo in iceland causing a humonguos meteor to fall into austrailia and killing all of the worlds opera singers thus making everyone happy again and then everyone died except nalts, he lived. (run-on consider revising)