Have you ever had an idea you were sure was going to take the world by storm?

If it was such a great idea, what happened to it?

How come it isn’t implemented into the world now, making it a better place?

Oh yeah, that’s right. It probably wasn’t that great an idea, and that’s probably why it’s not the idea that’s running today’s world, right?

Or is that actually all wrong?

See, it might be that whatever idea you had was actually the perfect idea for the perfect problem, thought up at the perfect time.

If that’s the case, how come your idea still didn’t take the world by storm?

How come your idea didn’t go viral?

Every other week it seems like some silly humorous video makes its rounds around the entire globe, yet your idea hasn’t been shared past the original Google Doc it was written on.

How Does Something Go Viral?

In order to make it so your idea goes viral, let’s first set up an example, and let that example be a video you would like to go viral.

As mentioned earlier, it seems like every week there’s some new video that your family passes back and forth whilst laughing like hyenas.

Where do those videos come from and what is it about them which causes us to share them so forthrightly?

Let’s answer the first question first.

Where do those videos come from that end up going viral?

As it turns out, they don’t just fall from the sky and happen on their own. There are a bunch of ways to make a viral video, and the top three ways are the following.

Ways to Go Viral

The first way is to make a viral video unintentionally. That means that you just happened to be recording something that people would find interesting enough to share to the point where it went viral. What makes it interesting could be anything from something that brings them joy, to something that disgusts them.

The second way is to make a viral video that’s humorous. The difficult thing about making humorous videos that go viral is picking the humor. It has to be something that will connect with every single one of the tens of millions of viewers that will end up seeing the video.

If you can master how to connect to such a large audience, this method becomes the guaranteed repetitive key to success for you.

The final way to make a viral video is to make a promotional viral video. This is different from the first two, which didn’t really have a set purpose except to entertain you or to make you laugh. The point of a promotional viral video is to promote a product or service.

The key to making these successful is by making the video useful, making it so that the critical points of the videos are timed properly, and by evoking emotion.

Why Do We Share  

Let’s stick to that last word for a second. Emotion.

Now that we’ve spoken about the ways to make a viral video, let’s talk about what makes a video go viral. The answer to that is simple. Videos go viral when people share them with one another.

Eventually, so many people have seen and shared the video that it’s amassed hundreds of thousands, if not hundreds of millions of views.

So what causes us to share the videos?

The answer to that question is the one word we said we’d hold onto for a second. You see, a video cannot go viral unless it can evoke our fundamental emotions.

Those are things like happiness, sadness, contentment, amazement, wonder, disgust, anger. Though they do not always have to be positive emotions, they have to be emotions regardless.

The Key to Going Viral

 

So let’s go over everything we’ve learned.

Viral videos are videos that evoke people to share them forthrightly. They clearly communicate to the viewer that they have made a connection with the fundamental human emotions that are in the heart of every human being on the planet.

It is for that reason that viral videos are shared so easily, and near immediately after being viewed.

Some of the things that increase the quality of viral videos are things like the usefulness of the video, whether the creators of the video had a good sense of timing they could incorporate around the content, and most importantly whether they could evoke emotion from the viewer.

If you can manage to complete that checklist as you’re creating a video, you can be sure that it’ll go viral.