18 Years of Going Viral Advice in 28 Minutes

After working with Taylor Swift, MTV, Vice Magazine, IKEA, YouTube, Yahoo, Mindvalley, and countless other brands, our viral content model has generated over 60 billion views, 100 million followers, and 1 billion in revenue. Now, during our 18 years of repeated success, we've learned this going viral is not luck, it's a science. And the real problem is almost no one knows how to create repeated viral success because they're missing a model. Now, this is why my team and I have developed the viral content model, a process that anyone can use to go viral and increase their revenue in just a few months, even if they're not rich and famous. Just like Tanner, a leather craftsman who after six months of working with us, went from 2,000 to 800,000 TikTok followers and increased his website traffic from 10,000 to over 100,000 visitors. So sit back, because over the next half hour, I'll share with you our step by step model to help you go viral not once, not twice, but dozens of times, allowing you to expose your business to more people, get more clients, and maybe even double your revenue. The first thing that you need to know about going viral is there is a mistake almost every everyone I know, from big brands to small entrepreneurs, makes when they start on social media. This mistake costs people a lot of money, and even worse, a lot of their time. But the solution is actually simple, and the root of it stems from an Abraham Lincoln quote. Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. But what does sharpening an axe look like when it comes to social media? First, let's look at what it doesn't look like. Lets say you wake up one day determined to finally give social media a chance, and you think that this will change your business forever. You've seen teenagers get millions of likes and followers in a matter of months. So how hard can it actually be? You create an account and post your first video, unaware of what will actually happen. The video is a passionate explanation of the most important aspect of your business. You educate viewers on why this is so important, to give them actionable tips, and of course, ask people to buy your products and services at the end. But as you look at the screen, you see only a few dozen views. Time goes by and you don't see any improvements. In fact, a part of you almost thinks that you actually see the views go lower. You're disappointed. You think the game is rigged against you. The algorithm doesn't want you to succeed. Only a few lucky people can make money from social media. So so you give up. Walk away from the pile of cash you should have made. But it doesn't need to be like that. Here's why everything went wrong. You don't understand how the algorithm works. But if you do, you'll never have to waste money on ads or time on content. Nobody will ever watch again, and you'll finally get new customers. People think the algorithms are there to suppress their reach on purpose, so they have to pay for ads. But if that were the case, they wouldn't see people going viral organically. Only the biggest brands and the people with the biggest budgets would go viral. Here's what the algorithms do. They optimize for making you stay. And because of this, because the more time you spend on the platforms, the more ads they can serve and thus the more profits they can generate. And the reality is, with social media platforms, they don't create any original content. As opposed to a Netflix or a Disney, which invest billions of dollars in original creations. However, we do. We are the fuel behind social media. So the platforms want to be our friends because we create content for them. We are the fuel that runs these platforms. It's never about beating the algorithms, it's about partnering with them. But how do you create content that the algorithm will love? Well, this isn't easy, but it is simple. It's not about reinventing the wheel. It's about doing what already works. This is why the number one step to going viral is to find a success trail. Now what I mean is that you'll analyze creators content so that you understand the trail that led them to success. Doing this guarantees your knowledge about what works on social media is sharp. Before you go and try and chop down that tree or post that video, I've seen this small insight change the lives of dozens of clients. Where before they would post stuff only they liked and get almost no views, now they study other successful creators, find out what works, and consistently get high views on their content. So here's an action point so you can start doing the same. Choose three successful creators in the social media platform of your choice. Remember, successful creators aren't those who have only a few hit videos, but those who can pull off hundreds of thousands or even millions of views in most of their videos without being a celebrity. Then find their success trail. But now you may be wondering, how do you find someone's success trail? You have to pay attention to the structure behind their content. When you build a house, it's nice to think about the color of the walls and the furniture. But if you don't build a solid structure, you'll never get to these details. It's the same with social media success. The result is a lot of people go viral, but their views go downhill. Just like a house with a weak structure falling down to the ground. This happens because most people try to make content based on trends instead of formats. So what is the difference? Well, a trend is a post or a topic or an idea that's hyped or popularized for a limited period of time. Just like the Ice Bucket challenge, a lot of people who posted something like that at the time of the challenge would get a lot of views. But those were just the tip of the iceberg because a lot more people who made videos about it, they didn't get any views. You just didn't know that because the algorithm only shows you the videos that get a lot of engagement and a lot of visibility. So if you try to create a video about that now, your chances of success will be even worse and you'll get next to zero views. But with a format, it's different. A format is a storytelling structure that is designed to work for, for any subject matter and last for years, even decades. So for example, every time Steven Spielberg makes a movie, he's not reinventing the three act structure. That would be a massive waste of time. Every single one of his movies still has a setup, conflict and resolution. He follows a format. And the simple truth to going viral is you need to master one single format over time. Choosing a format is more powerful than any trend could ever be. Because as Bruce Lee once said, I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. And this principle is especially true for people who want to go viral to advertise their business or services as opposed to becoming an influencer. Because when you master a format, people, people get attached to your content. It's familiar, they keep coming back, and eventually they start to trust you. Just like what happened with our client, Tanner.

If I can become the trusted leather advisor in front of these people over time, they will understand, okay, if this guy says something good about this brand, I trust it. And in the long run, it will obviously turn into sales for my own brand. Because once they figure out I'm an expert, they trust me. Direct correlation, they will at least try because they don't have that trust issue anymore. I don't need to try to sell.

This is why choosing a format is step two of our method. But how do you identify the right format for your Social media strategy to answer this question, let's take a look at Dr. Julie Smith. She's an accomplished psychologist who wanted to teach millions of people and make mental health more accessible. But the problem is the average person is not really interested in hearing complex psychological concepts, so they probably won't click on a video with this topic. So Dr. Julie Smith chose a different approach that allowed her to get over 12 million views in a single video, sell over 1 million copies of her book, and appear in major TV shows. Let's watch one of her videos to find out what her approach was. I want you to pay attention and see if you can identify a format. Write down three things that you notice about the structure of this video.

Don't make this mistake. When you're working on your own happiness, imagine this is you and this is your life. But like most people's lives, there are problems that can make it toxic. If a fish is living in a toxic environment, eventually it gets sick. So you take her out of the dirty water and put her in a new tank for a while. Kind of like how you take a break, you go on holiday for a few weeks into a new environment and it helps. Everything gets better and feels great for a while until you return and go right back to that toxic situation again. And it doesn't matter how clean the water was on your break or how refreshed you feel, eventually you will get sick again. If you want to thrive in the long term, you have to focus on cleaning up the environment that is affecting you every day. I'm a psychologist.

Follow for more so we can see There are three key things about this video. There's an abstract or complex topic, a visual representation of the topic with physical objects, and a verbal explanation of the topic. These all make the format which is best explained with an analogy. Think of when you go to Subway. You can add different types of ingredients every time you go there. They all taste a little bit different, but at the end of the day they are still a sandwich. So you can imagine a Subway meal as a format, meaning the sandwich is the format and all the little ingredients that you put into it are different video ideas. Understanding this is key to driving more awareness and sales for your business. Because on social media what's important isn't what you say, but how you say it. So if you find a format that helps you explain your topics in in a creative and engaging way, then you'll get thousands or even millions of views. Later, I'll show you exactly why and how more views convert into more sales but for now, let's see what your action points are for this section. Search for keywords in your field, like house, dog, or sale. When you do that, you'll probably realize you're not finding repeatable formats, but you'll find one off Funny dog videos. But that's not something that you can create over and over again successfully. So the next step is to pair the keywords in your field with a format keyword. Here's a list of all the format keywords we use with clients. Pause the video and write them down. So, for example, if you're in the cooking niche, you can pair the keyword cooking with a format keyword like hack and type that on the search bar to find good references. Now, finding a format will be easy, but remember, only choose formats that consistently bring hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Otherwise it's going to be harder to succeed. Finally, watch the creator's most watched videos and try to identify their core elements. Then transpose the format to your field. For example, we just saw Julie Smith's visual metaphor format. Now, if you're a lawyer, can you think of a similar way to explain law topics? But finding a format is just one half of the problem, because some people make videos in successful formats and still fail. And sometimes even the same creator can see a dramatic difference in performance in the same format, like Julie Smith herself. To explain how you can avoid that, I will show you two videos. One did 12 million views, while the other only got a couple hundred thousand. So as you watch these two videos, trying to determine which one performed better and why.

Now imagine this is you, and these are all the bad things that happened to you. So each one represents a memory of traumatic experiences that you've been through. And as you go about your life, the thing seems like it's overflowing. Memories just keep falling out when you don't want them to, emotionally overwhelming you. And you can't seem to focus on the rest of the your life. So what can we do about it? Well, I'm a psychologist, and this is what happens in trauma therapy. First of all, a therapist would gear you up with all the skills you need to manage just how painful those memories can be. And then you take one memory at a time, carefully open it up at your own pace and allow you to process that memory. And then you can neatly fold it up. You do the same with the next one, and the next one, until what you're left with is a neat little pile of memories that fit neatly at the bottom, leaving you more capacity to focus on the life that you want to have today.

So that's the first video. We're going to watch the second video. And again, as you watch the second video, think about which one performed better, which one got the 12 million views and which one underperformed and why.

Imagine for a moment that you're stood in front of a busy road with traffic going both ways, and each of those vehicles represents a thought or a feeling coming in and out of your mind. Now, you might be like most other people and spend a good deal of your time in the middle of that road trying to direct the traffic. There are some thoughts you want to hold on to, right? And there's others that you want to push away. But doing that causes more stress because the traffic just keeps on coming. Now, if I asked you to just step back from the curb and watch the traffic instead of trying to control it, just allowing it to pass and watching as it goes, that would be the process of mindfulness. When you notice that you're trying to hold on to certain thoughts and push others away, see if you can step back from the traffic and let it pass.

So which one performed better, the first or the second? Now, if you want a second, press pause and think about it. Jot down your ideas. But now I'm going to reveal the results. So the first video that we watched, the one with the wastepaper basket, 12 million views versus the second video with the car's 130,000 views. So the same creator, the same format, over 11 million views. That difference in performance. So why. So in the high performer, the first video, there's an active metaphor. So there's a clear visual story that involves the manipulation of the object, demonstrating the topic of the video. So as you notice, with the waste paper basket, she's actually manipulating object. She's taking paper out, she's folding it, she's putting it back in, versus the underperformer in the second video, instead of using an active metaphor, she she's asking the viewer to imagine the scenario and doesn't actually play with the objects. Now, the second aspect is the tension. So in the first video, there is clear tension in those first few seconds. And the first few seconds are critical to a video's performance. Within the first few seconds of the high performer, we can definitely see that there is a clear problem. There is a waste paper basket with a bunch of papers piled up. It's triggering in our subconscious that there is a problem, problem that is occurring in what this video is going to talk about versus the underperformer there isn't this clear visual problem. There's no visual tension on screen. The next difference is the potential energy, again with the high performer within the first second. Again, this basket full of papers. It hints to the viewer that there will be some interaction, that Julie Smith is going to do something with it versus in the underperformance performer. She doesn't reach for a car or have any other object on screen that's implying that there's going to be some interaction. All she promises is a visual story that she's going to break through. The final aspect is the cleverness of it. So in the high performer, it's very clever. She's using everyday objects. She's using a waste paper basket and papers that fill trash can. We use this on an everyday basis. So it's extremely clever and it's unexpectedly smart of how she's breaking down this complex subject matter below. Performer, there's not an unexpected smart decision here or demonstration. She asked the viewers to do work by imagining the metaphor. So again, massive difference in performance with the same format and the same creator. So step three of going viral is analyzing high and low performers in the same format. That way you're creating content based solely on what works. And I promise doing this process will put you ahead of 99% of creators because they just don't do this. Now, most creators just mindlessly copy viral videos without understanding what makes them work and end up getting lackluster results. Now, when we compared Dr. Julie Smith's videos, we wrote down the elements that made the high performance work. We call these elements performance drivers because, well, they drive the video's performance to a destination most of the time. Success. To better understand this, imagine your video like it's a Formula one car. Every car has the same parts, like the engine, the transmission, the tires. But if the engine in one car is just slightly better than the other one, this can bring the difference in milliseconds needed to win. The truth is, the devil is in the details. In Formula one and and social media, your content might be good, but with just a slight change, it could be 10 times better. Now, I know identifying and applying these details can be hard. This is why my team and I have spent thousands of hours identifying over 200 different performance drivers and we've boiled them down to the most powerful 20. But we don't have time to go through all of them in this video. So I'll explain the one that might be the most important to. To get your audience interested in anything, you have to Say, and maybe even eventually turn them into customers. And it's called the generalist principle. Let's illustrate this with an example. There is a YouTuber, Graham Stephan, who teaches finance to millennials. Finance is not really a sexy subject, especially for millennials. But his most viewed video was how I bought a Tesla for $78 a month. This works because he's framing the video in a way that anybody would be interested to see. See how this young guy bought a Tesla for $78 a month. But then he's unfolding the story and teaching the fundamentals of finance. If the video was titled I'm going to teach you the five ways to maximize car financing, nobody would really care. The video would have gotten 10,000 views instead of 9 million views. Now, you may ask yourself, what's the use of getting 9 million views for my business? So let's break this down. Let's say that your business or brand today, on average, is generating 10,000 views a video. And out of that, let's say it's 80%. Let's be generous. 80% of those 10,000 people watching your video are your core audience. Now let's push it up to 9 million views. Now, there is going to be a drop off in terms of your core audience watching that content, but let's just say that it drops down to 10%. So 10% of 9 million people watching that content is 900,000. So with this principle of going viral, we've just gone from 8,000 people that could potentially buy our product watching our videos to over 900,000. So imagine that. Imagine that 900,000 people with each piece of content you produce is watching your video and could potentially buy your products and services. How would that impact your bottom line? Let's dive into an example. So Ryan Sirhant is a luxury real estate agent in Manhattan, New York. So he sells luxury properties ranging from 15 million all the way up to 250 million. So his core audience of what drives his business is extremely small. But what he does is he plays the generalist principle. So he creates videos like, let me take you on a tour of a $7 million closet. Let me take you on a tour of a $250 million ranch. And he knows anybody would be interested in watching those videos. So he generates millions and millions of views a month. But he knows that only if less than 1% of those millions of people watching his content is his core audience, it will have a massive impact on his business. He has even said a single YouTube video has sold a third $30 million property in Manhattan. Now, here's how you analyze formats to get the best out of them. Identify the high and low performers from a creator that you're researching. Then play the high and low performers of a format side by side. Uncover the drivers that make each format successful, and then write them down. Now, before clients work with us, most of them waste hours looking at a blank screen to try and come up with a couple of ideas. But after we go through our ideation system with them, they unlock the ability to get over a hundred ideas in about an hour. Because the truth is, getting a lot of good ideas fast is easy if you start from something that already exists. So let's put into practice step four of our viral method ideation. So I'm going to pull up Tanner Leatherstein, one of our clients TikTok accounts, and look at one of his most successful videos that has over 10 million views, called our Coach Leather bags worth it. Now, as we look at this video, we want to break down what is the difference between a format and the idea. So the format is, is it worth it? Meaning he uses this format over and over again to break down whether this leather good, this purse, this expensive product is worth the money that you're paying for it. It the idea is, is the coach leather bag worth it? So he's using the coach bag as the idea. Other examples of ideas within this format is, are Louis Vuitton wallets worth it? Are Christian Louis Vuitton shoes worth it? Are Prada leather bags worth it? So the product itself is the idea within the is it worth it Format. So how can you use this format in a different industry? Well, think about whether you're a realtor. So if you're a realtor, you can do, is a house in Beverly Hills worth it? Is a house in Miami beach worth it? Is a $120,000 new townhouse worth it? Is a $5,000 house in Detroit worth it? So again, the format is, is it worth it? And then you can put your ideas into that specific format. Now, you can do that for 10 videos. First, find formats from success, successful creators. Replace the topic parts of the title with your own ideas. Try to have around 10 for each video, and just like that, you have a hundred video ideas. But it's important to remember that you should write everything down, even if some of the ideas seem to be bad. Singer songwriter Ed Sheeran swears by this principle whenever he writes a song. He uses this analogy to guide his process. If you run the tap and the water is dirty at first. And instead of leaving the tap and trying to find water elsewhere, it's best to keep running the tap until the water becomes clear. Ideas are like this for songwriting and for social media. You'll get the bad ones along with the good ones. Your job is to write everything down and choose the best ones later. Now, here's where the biggest mistake of all comes in. Believe it or not, big brands do it all the time. And this mistake is can put everything we've done so far to waste. On the other hand, if you learn to avoid it, you'll be ahead of even the biggest brands like Coca Cola and Nike. So what these brands do is they batch produce content and plan out these lengthy content calendars, meaning they'll sit down, they'll produce 20, 30 or maybe even more videos or pieces of content at a time. Now, the reason this is a huge mistake, there is a huge opportunity loss for learning with each piece of content. Meaning if you post the first out of 30 videos that you've produced and that video underperforms and you can look at and say, oh man, we did that wrong. But we've got 29 other videos that we produced and we need to post them, you lose a massive opportunity to fix that mistake for the next video and the next video. And this is what catches creators up all the time. As they post that first video, it bombs. They can't take those learnings to fix the other ones. And thus they repeat the cycle over and over and over again consistently. Going viral on social media is not about quantity. It is about quality. This is why creating a single piece of content at a time is step five in our method. But if you don't believe quality can be quantity, let me show you. There's a creator who posts YouTube videos or one to two times a month. Sometimes he even goes a couple months without posting anything. Still, he's one of the most successful YouTubers of his generation. His name, Mark Rober. The same could be said about Quentin reviews. And even Mr. Beast at one point was only posting once a month. Now, of course, quantity can be good. The more you do something, the better you get at it. And if you already understood and perfected your format, quantity can make you grow even faster. But if it makes you burn out, it's just not worth it. And there's a lot of proof that you can set your own pace and still achieve massive success. Now here's what you need to do to complete step five of the process. Choose the most promising idea from step four. Look at all the Performance drivers that you found when analyzing the creators you chose. In step two, create a checklist with these performance drivers and have it by your side. While you're creating your video. Create one piece of content using these performance drivers. Now, I must be blunt with you. Even if you do all of this, your video might fail. But don't worry, we have a process to help you fix that. Our model has been tested with hundreds of creators. So there are only two reasons people fail when they use it. They paid attention to the wrong thing when analyzing the format or they executed it poorly. This is why the last step in our viral model is to review your video and the results it generated. This step is the reason one of our clients, Tanner Leatherstein, was able to find a formula that worked every time and perfected it until it got him a 10 million views video.

We, we did the Chanel video. That video went viral first time I was shocked and we sit down. Okay, now what happened here? Looking from you guys lens, these were the elements I feel like made the difference. So I used the same formula applied into a Brooks Brothers bag and it worked just like that, even better than the Chanel.

So here's how you review your results. Play the high performers from other creators side by side with your videos and be honest with yourself. Find all the ways that you might have failed to execute on a specific element. Now, if you do this enough times, you will get not only one, but dozens of viral videos that will help you reach more people than you ever thought possible. Remember, creating viral content is not lucky. It's a science with a repeatable process. And if you have a good product or service, inevitably your viral videos will bring you new customers. You now have the roadmap to go viral. But it would be impossible for me to share everything that I've learned over the past 18 years of work in just one video. That's why I distilled down all the strategies and secrets and shortcuts of our viral content model, which has been used to generate over 60 billion views, 100 million followers, and 1 billion in client revenue into a brand new book just for you. So if you're ready to scale your brand, click the link below in the description to download the guide to going viral for free and start your journey to viral success.