How I Went Viral My First Video (Step by Step)

My first-ever video went viral on a brand new channel, and it wasn’t luck. Here is the step-by-step breakdown of how I did it.

Viewer Avatar Targeting

I used viewer avatar targeting to guarantee views as soon as the video went public; this gave me an incredibly unfair advantage as YouTube didn’t have to find my ideal viewer. It already knew who it was.

For those who don't know what a viewer avatar is, it’s the cumulative sum of an individual's viewing habits and behavior on YouTube. YouTube will then group similar viewer avatars and create a “viewer avatar group,” which is exactly how it sounds.

If you can identify this “viewer avatar” and make content for them, YouTube will distribute that content to them and the associated group.

You can find your ideal viewer by figuring out what creators your ideal viewer will watch and then creating a piece of content that those creators could have made. By doing this, you will get their viewers as they are already primed to watch that style of content.

It’s a bit more challenging to figure this out starting from zero, but it is still doable; if you already have a channel, you can use YouTube’s internal tool to tell you what channels your audience watches.

Content Gaps

Once you know who your viewer avatar is, the rest is as simple as creating content that your ideal viewer will watch.

In the case of Couch Co-Op, we were dedicated to making video essays about FPS games. This is because we saw a large total addressable market in this space and an asymmetrical supply-and-demand attention market. In this case, the demand for FPS game video essays was high based on the number of outliers around FPS games vs. the number of FPS game video essays produced. So, we exploited this.

By exploiting this supply-and-demand asymmetry, finding our ideal viewer avatar before launching, and having an expectational video, we could stand out in the market. YouTube was working in our favor by funneling views to us.

Audience Testing

Once we had made our first video and we hit upload. At this point, YouTube was responsible for conducting audience testing by showing our video to an audience that thought it would be satisfied by the content.

This is the only area where we are not in control. We can account for everything else, and we can give YouTube as much data as possible, but sometimes we won’t get tested with the right audience on our first try or even our 10th try. That’s part of the YouTube game and the most “luck” factor. Still, though, we can mitigate nearly all other randomness.

Thankfully, with all of our other prep, we were tested with the correct audience early on and were able to reap the rewards of having the correct audience in mind.

Once YouTube tests our content to the correct viewer avatar, it will then scale it within this “audience,” which is just the sum of viewer-similar and adjacent viewer avatars.

Once YouTube finds the correct audience or (sum of viewer profiles), it will then test similar audiences. It will keep doing this forever until it reaches a hard cap, more or less.

YouTube does this by looking for the TAM or the “total addressable market”. The TAM is the total market for a specific idea or how many people are interested. Some people have TAMs of billions (Mr Beast), and others have TAMs of a few hundred thousand (my channel, for example).

Conclusion

In short, if you know who your ideal viewer is and, by extension, who your ideal audience is, you can take advantage of content gaps to go viral. It’s simple in theory and is also simple in execution, so go out and try it. Send us the results you get on Twitter, and make sure to use 1of10 to find your next viral video idea.