The fact that my latest YouTube video is just over a month old breaks one of my own rules that I’ll talk about later on about the importance of keeping your online presence regular.  Like bowel movements, dumping videos into YouTube is healthy… for keeping your subscribers happy  (it’s Friday and I’m in an extra silly mood so bear with me).

But, regardless of that, my most recent video did manage to get 10,000 views in it’s first month.  And it wasn’t just luck that got me there.  If you upload videos to YouTube then you know how hard it can be to even break a hundred views in a month sometimes.  But there are some things that you can do to change that.  Let’s take a look at the main things that worked for this video, which I called “The Comfortable Stick”.

First of all, I made a video based on something that was already popular and being talked about. I had seen the “Comfort Wipe” commercial on YouTube (I think in the Most Viewed section of the day) and a couple friends on Facebook had posted it on their profiles.  Those things, all happening on the same day, were clear indicators to me that this was something that was popular and was probably just at the beginning of it’s rise in popularity.

Now, myself, I really like to do spoofs of things in my videos.  I’m an actor and a comedian and I have good video shooting and editing skills so those work well for me.  Other options could have been to review the commercial, or to record myself make a prank call while trying to order one, or something else along those lines.  But since I knew I wanted to do a parody, I sat down and thought about what I could do to make it even more ridiculous of a product than it already was.

But beyond picking a “hot” video to spoof, I also did what a lot of unsuccessful YouTubers don’t do - I put a lot of time and effort into my video.  As I’m sure you can tell when you watch it, this wasn’t just thrown together haphazardly.  I actually transcribed the original video word for word and wrote out a full shot list of everything they showed as well.   I then altered the script to make it work with my concept and make it funnier, and then planned out my own shots to again make it work best with what I wanted to do.

After all the planning was complete, I had to head out to a second hand store to find some stuff that I needed for costumes and props (although the main props only required me to go searching under the trees along my street).  Then I spent the rest of the beautiful, sunny day shooting the video in my apartment while my friends were at the beach.  I didn’t have anyone to videotape me so it took a while to get the shots right and I had to do most of them multiple times to get them to look like I wanted.  Then I recorded the voiceover a few times and finally began the editing process, which took hours to put the shots together just like the original and add all the graphics and effects.

And finally, after a complete full day of working on the video from early in the morning until late at night, it was finished and ready to be uploaded.  But it’s not like my efforts were done there.  Next came the marketing.  I’ll get into marketing yourself online more in a future post, but the long and short of it is that you have to do it, despite what some people think.  Nothing that I’ve ever done online that’s had any success happened without me spending hours (and usually days) finding ways to spread the word and create hype about it through email, facebook, twitter, news releases, on other blogs, etc.

So, the long and short of it is, I picked a hot topic, I devoted a full day to making the best video I could, and then I spent hours over the following days and weeks getting the word out about it.

I’ll get into even more ways to get your videos more views on YouTube in future posts, but for now here’s The Comfortable Stick for your viewing pleasure… at10,000 views (as I write this) and counting.