A YouTube video by Lauren Bateman describing how one of her 2017 guitar-lesson videos went viral in late 2019, producing sustained traffic and increased course sales. The creator analyzes factors that likely caused the surge (fit-for-audience title/thumbnail, engagement, long watch time) and emphasizes persistence in content creation and the long-tail value of YouTube.
I'm going to show you the top reason that I love YouTube and what happens when one of your videos starts to go viral, how it can grow your YouTube channel, how it can help you sell more courses. And I'm going to show you what happened, the story of my first video that went viral and how it changed my YouTube channel forever.
So I pulled up the video that went viral on my channel and I pulled up the lifetime view because I think this is super important for you to pay attention. So you'll notice I uploaded this video June of 2017. It was one of the first videos that I created on my YouTube channel for guitar lessons. I started uploading videos the end of March. So we're March, April, May, June. Okay, so here we are. You see my video one is some days zero views, but getting mostly single digit views for quite a long time. I'm in 2018, 2019, sometimes getting double digits. And then all of a sudden you're going to see this spike here. Holy crap, what happened? You can see my video took off and it's kind of died down over the years. We're talking, we're in 2023 now, but the video is still getting a few hundred views a day. So this is a view, this is a video I made in 2017 that still gets views today. But let's focus in on this spike right here. So now we have a custom view of the entire year for 2019. So you see once again, this video wasn't doing much for the entire year. And and then we see a slow climb here in the month of October. Now it's very important to note on this video, I got married October 5th and I was gone for the entire month of October on my honeymoon in Italy. So I did nothing with my channel the entire month of October, which I think is interesting that this video started climbing in October and then all of a sudden November, you see a few hundred views and then boom, we've got three thousands of views a day. And what happened with this video? Well, this video, it seemed that I had titled and thumbnailed it correctly. You can see here, the thumbnail wasn't the greatest, but it was play thousands of songs with only four chords. This was a problem that my audience had. And I said, here, it's the first guitar chords you need to learn easiest beginner guitar chords for playing songs. So it was a pain point of my audience. And you can see it's a longer video. It's about 14 minutes. And longer videos do tend to get more watch time and remember, watch time gets a lot more attention from YouTube. But I think the biggest thing that benefited this video was the engagement and the watch time. So you can see here 33,000 likes. You can see the video. It's grainy, it's dark. It's not the greatest. My editing is like picture on picture. It's like sticky. Standard definition. I don't even think this is HD. And we got tons and tons of comments. 2198 comments. So I think people are watching this video and they were saying, wow, this was super helpful. This is great. This is awesome. And you can see I went in and we replied to all of the responses on these videos. But I really think this video benefited a lot from engagement and it was sending signals to YouTube. Hey, people are paying attention to this video. But you'll notice it took time for YouTube to find the video and send it out. I recorded this video in 2017, and it took off in 2019. Two and a half years later, YouTube decides out of nowhere that it's going to start serving this video to people. And I knew something was happening because something interesting happened on my course sales. So I had a course that was running and we had a monthly option and we had a full pay option. So you can see here that I have the same time frame. So this is January through December. And you can notice that video started picking up kind of in October. And you see there's a lot higher spikes in sales as we get towards the end of the year. You can see here there's a few $20 sales. Not much, Couple spikes here. But all of a sudden there's all these spikes. And I kept getting emails saying, you sold a course, you sold a course, you sold the course. I'm like, what the heck is going on? So I went over to my website to say, hey, is one of my website pages taking off? Like, what's going on here? I saw a boost in traffic on my website, but I had no clue where it was coming from until I went over to my YouTube channel and I was like, holy crap, this video is taking off. And what's happening is people are watching this video, they're really liking the content, they're enjoying the teaching that they're searching for me on Google and going and buying my course. I didn't even have a call to action in that video or a link in the description below or comment or anything. People were liking my teaching so much that they were going and searching probably for Lauren Bateman guitar course or Lauren Bateman course, and they were going in, and you can see they were buying this course. So if you see the monthly view now, it's a little bit more straightforward. So you can see on average, you know, a few hundred bucks a month. Nothing really to write home about. Hey, I was making my car payment. That's great. But then all of a sudden, in October, you see the spikes. November, December. And I was like, holy crap. That, my friends, is the power of YouTube and why it's important to keep going. It is a long trail. What if I gave up on YouTube here? Because I know a lot of us, we think about quitting YouTube. It's not really going our way quite yet, right? What happens if I quit here in December 2017? All right. Or January 2018? This video has been out for six months, and it did nothing. And it's like, you know what? Maybe YouTube's not my thing. Maybe it's not for me. This algorithm stinks. But I kind of stuck it out. What happens if I gave up here? March 2019. Now, see, here's the interesting thing, because I was getting ready to quit on YouTube. I really was. I was like, you know, I'm not really doing that well. Look at this. 25 views. Whoop de doo. Nothing to write home about. And I said, you know what? I'm gonna go on my honeymoon, and when I come back, we'll see what happens. And YouTube was finally like, you know what? We're gonna give Lauren a little respect. We're gonna show one of her videos. And when they did, people commented on it, they liked it, they watched it. And you can see yout been sharing out this video for a very, very long time. And in 2020, 2021, I redid this video to make an HD version. So I think people are now seeing that video more than this one. But you can still see I made this video in 2017. It's still working for me today, and it's probably still selling me courses to this day. Now, growing organically on YouTube is the cheapest and most straightforward way to grow your YouTube channel. But it sometimes takes a little bit of time. If you're interested in learning about how YouTube advertising might help grow your channel in the beginning, check out this video over here, where I go over the do's and don'ts of YouTube advertising.
