We all know that just one viral video can give a huge boost to a channel and get it of the ground and even launch it into the sky.
And for a small channel a viral video doesn’t have to have millions of views, even just a few tens of thousands are a game changer.
One way you can create a video like this, is something I did by accident, and it helped me go from a channel of a few hundred subscribers to a few thousands in less then a month.
So that is enough for the intro, here is the main point:
Find a potentially viral subject, event, idea, trick, tip etc. in a non English language, do it in English and post on your channel while promoting in places that are relevant to that subject.
Now how this worked out in my case:
I run a gaming channel, started in 2011. about a single PC video game. Then after a launch of a new, very popular game, I started making videos about it and researching it’s game-play for more video ideas. I ran across a video in Japanese showing how something could be done which was not enabled in the game by the developers but could be done under certain specific conditions. I saw that is was really useful and after more experimentation found even more uses for it. Then I made a 20+ minute video about it and posted it on the official forums for the game.
The first two days I got a relative spike in views, but nothing amazing. Then, as players started to share my video it exploded to thousands of views a day, and because I had other video about this game, I gained over a thousand subscribers just in the next few weeks. Later the subject of the video was made obsolete by the developers update for the game but 6 years later and that video is still getting views, it’s almost up to 300,000 with YouTube suggesting it 20% of those views, another 20% from search and 20% from browse.
It might seem like a cheap way of making a viral video and using someone else’s idea but how many of you speak Japanese, and how many times did YouTube recommend you a video in a foreign language besides English?
Videos in other languages are a gold mine of information and ideas but the language barrier is just too large.
So, that is my tip for you today. I hope you are able to use it. Good luck!
F(AWXM) 