How I quickly got 30,000 views & made $100

Back in March I wrote about an online video contest that I had entered put on by Doritos about who could get the most viral video promoting their product.  Well, I finally received my prize – a $100 cheque for finishing in 34th place (out of 1184 entries).  My video ended up with just under 30,000 views which isn’t bad for something that didn’t cost anything to make, took only a minute to shoot, and required very little editing (just adding the Doritos logo & crunch sound).  Where the time came in though was promoting it – the video’s content certainly didn’t get those views on its own.

The first thing I did was pick a subject that had recently gone viral on the internet.  In this case it was a video of a 3 year old girl crying over Justin Bieber and how much she loves him.  I decided to spoof it with myself in the little girl’s role, but crying over how much I love Doritos.  I got my friend Marc to hold the camera and say the lines that the mother said in the original, and Craig played the role of the consoling older sister.  Just the fact that it was related to another popular YouTube video would already give me an advantage.

Next I set the title to have the words “Doritos Viralocity” so that people would find it when looking for videos in the contest and because their scoring system gave extra points for videos that came up at the top of Google for those words.  In the description I had all of the words in the original video’s title so that it would come up in searches and as a related video to that one.  I also wrote the words “Doritos Viralocity” a a second time.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to control the tags or category as this was being uploaded by Doritos to their own YouTube channel.

That also meant I didn’t have the advantage of getting my 3000 YouTube subscribers to automatically see it.  So I had to find other ways to get it seen by them.  I set it as the featured video on my YouTube channel since you can actually do that with videos that aren’t your own and I added it to my favorites and to my playlist that I have for videos on other channels with me in them.  And then the rest was social media driven.

I posted the video on my Facebook Wall once every few days.  Each time I posted it, a different set of people seemed to “Like” or comment on it.  I tweeted about it on Twitter once a day and retweeted anyone else who mentioned it.  I created an event on Facebook which ran for the duration of the contest and invited all of my friends to it.  And any time I saw a friend of mine post it to their Facebook Wall I made sure to “Like” and/or comment on it, since both help it to be found more often in the newsfeed.

And maybe best of all was that I had two other people doing the same thing.  Just by having two others in the video, I was able to triple the amount of exposure it was getting via social media because both of them were doing the same thing I was.

In the end, I didn’t win the big prize, but I placed in the top 3% of all the video entries and I still received $100 for my efforts… so now I have to take Craig & Marc for dinner!

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YouTube Comment of the Day:

jm2trash has made a comment on Are you gay?:

“A guy in tight shorts makes my day!” lmao
Yay gay!