BY TJ Walker
One of the most widely viewed videos I ever shot for YouTube was one I spent exactly 24 seconds preparing and thinking about and 66 seconds shooting it. I uploaded it without so much as remembering to even give it a description. It was a simple critique of the speaking skills of another video blogger who reviews clothes and accessories for young women. I never gave it another thought. Then one day I noticed that it had tens and tens of thousands of views. I would give you the URL but I am ashamed of it. The lighting is awful. The sound is sub-par. And, unlike most of my daily videos, the number of genuine insights I delivered was fairly low.
So there are two big lessons here: #1. You never really know what is going to be popular on the internet, so don’t waste a lot of time trying to figure it out. Instead, try to produce as much high quality video as possible on a regular basis and you will get your share of singles, doubles, triples, and homeruns.
And #2, don’t put anything up on the internet that you would want tens or hundreds of thousands of people to see. My Glitzy glam video, with more than 30,000 views, had more people watching me than many of my appearances in the early years of MSNBC and Fox News Channel (they sometimes had only 15,000 viewers when they were starting in the 1990s.
Spend your time doing videos you can be proud of and don’t worry about which ones will go viral because you can’t figure it out. Just produce quality and eventually you get an audience.