Making Your Video Go Viral

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Having your video go viral is every direct marketer’s dream. Imagine your video sales message, reaching your best prospects with them loving it and sharing it with their tribes. Then friends of friends share it, and within days you have hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions of views. You sell a boatload of products and you’re hearing ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching all the way to the bank. Well, here are five ideas about creating videos that will be watched and perhaps shared.

But first, let’s make this very clear (and you already know this even if the boss or client doesn’t get it):

You can’t MAKE your video go viral.

Only the audience will decide if your video is worthy enough to go viral. For the most part, it’s out of your control.

So clear your brain of this fantasy and come back to reality. You may have to clear the boss’s brain or your client’s brain, too. Your odds of getting struck by lightning may be higher than having your video watched by the masses.

But there are two things you can do to encourage more people to watch your video, and maybe, just maybe, it will be a success for you on a down to earth scale.

Part one, discussed in today’s video, revolves around how you stimulate emotion for your online video, along with introducing you to the amygdala (a-mig’-de-lah)—the lizard brain.

Part two, in our next blog, revolves around how you influence the opportunity for your video to go viral through shared, paid and earned media, to create a ripple effect for distribution of your online video.

(If the video isn’t just above this line, click here to view it.)

Addendum to our last blog about video viewing on tablets:
The recently released “Adobe 2012 Mobile Consumer” report reveals a bit about the preferred activity of U.S. Tablet users by age. The percentages below reflect the percentage that cites “view videos” as the “most common tablet activity.”

Age 18-29 5.4%
Age 30-49 6.4%
Age 50-64 14.3%

It’s clear that an older age demographic—Baby Boomers, who grew up with television—use their tablets to watch online video at a much higher rate than people under the age of 50. And it’s clear, too, that as consumers discover the ease of video viewing on tablets, more and more will be there to watch your video, too.