3 Easy Ways To Create Viral YOUTUBE Videos

‘Viral’ is what transforms a struggling content creator to a heavily rewarded, subscribed, patronized influencer.

‘Viral’ is what takes your name/brand/content etc. from obscurity to national or international recognition.

‘Viral’ is what makes a man move literally from begging friends and families every single day to ‘like, share and subscribe’ to having your content on the WhatsApp status of millions of people.

However, ‘Viral’ is…not a day’s job or a wishful thought even though it is also not rocket science.

Get ready to go viral as you learn these 3 time-tested hacks and tips on how to create a viral YouTube video.

Add some Creative Spice to your Video Editing:

We are not talking Matrix-level slow-motion-bullet video editing here. We are just talking;

• Basic creative Video Transitions:

With the average human attention shorter than 7 seconds, you want to make sure there’s some decent but visually stimulating transitions in your video, especially if it’s an entertaining content.

• Basic Audio Enhancement:

Videos can’t go viral when people can’t even clearly make out the sounds, audio or words of the video. So you want to remove noisy backgrounds of loud car horns, cocks crowing, neighbours shouting and so on. You’d also want to add some cool trending audio backgrounds that can organically increase the reach of your content.

• Basic Text/Captioning:

According to https://vidiq.com/blog/post/youtube-captions/, ‘more than 400 million individuals are deaf or hearing impaired and cannot consume video content without captions or transcripts’.

It goes without saying then that captioning or sub-titling your videos increases reach to such hearing-impaired audience.  Furthermore, captioned videos (ads specifically) increase viewing time by an average of 12%according to Meta.

Design a video thumbnail that demands attention.

Some years ago, a group of researchers sourced YouTube API data to study and analyze the most popular videos on YouTube. It was discovered that 70% of the most popular videos feature thumbnails with titles or explanatory text.

Now what do they say about results again?

Results don’t lie!

So you know exactly what to do to make your next video go viral on Youtube, right?

• Create an eye-popping thumbnail (with free versions of Apps like Canva, you can easily do this)
• Let the thumbnail accurately show what the video is about
• Ensure the thumbnail includes characters’ faces and texts/titles (if applicable)
• Let your thumbnail image or text trigger scroll-stopping suspense. Rather than use, “My experience at a Kenyan Jungle”, you may rather say “What I did when an Animal came after me at a Kenyan Jungle.

Understand & Incorporate Niches, Elements and Other factors that make Videos go Viral:

Below are the niches and video categories that have more potential to go viral on Youtube.

 COMEDY VIDEOS

Laughter is no longer just the best medicine. Laughter is now food.

You get the point? You don’t have to be a comedian to add some humour and wit to your content. Take time to brainstorm how your content can make people laugh. Even if your message is serious, you can say serious things in engaging and entertaining ways. Africa’s YouTube Viral content creator and Doctor popularly known as Aproko Doctor is showing us it’s possible to add comedic effect to something as serious and professional as the field of medicine.

-CHALLENGE VIDEOS

This is a no-brainer. When you jump on trending challenges or add some elements, words, slangs, styles etc. from a trending meme or challenge to your video, it has a steroid-level effect on making your video reach more people.

You can also create challenges, contests, sweepstakes, competitions etc. around your videos. Businesses can use this to increase engagement and make their videos get huge amounts of shares.

-PRANK VIDEOS

A-ha.

Prank Videos! Rave of the moment. Again, you don’t have to be playing in the prank niche to pull off some decent prank videos once or twice.

Cheers to your first 1 million views!