I was both shocked and thrilled when a friend told me that I was on the homepage of the CollegeHumor web site in June. If you aren’t familiar with CollegeHumor, it’s a place that’s really popular for college students (or anyone in that general age range) to find all kinds of silly stuff including mostly outrageous photos and videos.  And I do mean really popular - it’s currently ranked #1,290 on Alexa.com out of all of the billions of web sites on the internet.

So how did my video get on the front page? Well, when I uploaded Father Lover to YouTube I didn’t just sit back and watch and hope it became a viral hit.  Instead I set aside a couple hours each day over the following week to go online and spread the word as much as possible. I found reasons to tweet about it a few times a day on Twitter, and reasons to mention it in my Facebook status or post it to my wall (or friends’ walls), and I searched for related blogs where I could make a comment that actually had to do with the blog, but still allow me to mention my video.  I also wrote up a press release and sent it to some blogs that I thought might be interested in mentioning it to their readers.  All of this self promotion lead to a lot of people checking out the video and spreading the word even more themselves and eventually it go to the people at CollegeHumor who then liked the video enough to feature it because they thought it would be something their audience would enjoy.

So overall it’s a mixture of self promotion, good content, and some luck.  But heavy emphasis on the self promotion because that’s something that’s often overlooked.  It takes a lot of time to make a good video and even more time to really spread the word and make sure it gets seen.

YouTube comment of the day:

bilsrylos has made a comment on Comfortable Stick (Comfort Wipe spoof):