How to Get 100,000,000 Views
Kong Pham and Jesse Jah
SimplePickupKong Pham and Jesse Jah are the cofounders of SimplePickup, where they teach guys how to be more confident through video evidence.
Kong Pham and Jesse Jah wanted to teach guys how to talk to women.
So they started filming themselves using their pickup tactics on women, then uploaded the videos to YouTube.
But when the videos came out, no one was watching. “We were under the impression that if you just put out a video, it’ll automatically go viral,” says Kong.
Today, Kong and Jesse, cofounders of SimplePickup, churn out videos that get 1.5 million views.
In their Mixergy course, Kong and Jesse show you how they do it. Here are three highlights from the course.
1. Infiltrate Their World
If your video doesn’t get some traction right away, it’s never going to go viral.
“If you make it go somewhat viral at the beginning, it’s kind of an exponential trajectory that starts,” says Kong. “You only need a few to share it on another viral forum, or another site, and that spreads to another one and that spreads to another one.”
So how do you get sites and forums to help spread your video?
Use the right lingo
Incorporate the phrases unique to their niche into your videos.
For instance, one niche that Kong and Jesse target is bodybuilders. Bodybuilding.com has a very, very popular forum, says Jesse. So Jesse and Kong frequented the forum and learned some phrases that bodybuilders use, then put those phrases into their videos.
“We talk to girls using these phrases, and then we got their numbers,” says Kong. “Now all of these forums that use these phrases, like 4chan, Bodybuilding, and even Reddit, where we got these phrases from, are now spreading it. They’re like, “Oh look, they’re using our memes.’”
2. Shock Your Audience
Jesse and Kong give their videos outrageous titles to get more views.
“You have these shocking titles so a lot of people will start clicking on it and start commenting on it,” says Kong. “[We use] swear words all the time.”
But what about someone with a more conservative audience? How do you use shocking titles without harming your reputation and brand?
Keep it relative
Write titles that shock, but don’t offend.
“Shocking is very relative to your industry,” says Kong.
For instance, if you’re in the makeup industry, “you don’t have to say ‘f–k the makeup companies,’ because that’s a little bit inappropriate,” says Kong. “Instead, you can say something like, Look Fabulous Like Lady Gaga. That wasn’t an amazing example because I’m not in the makeup industry, but you see what I mean?”
3. Rally the Troops
You’re going to have enemies, especially if you try to make viral videos, says Kong.
For instance, there was a blog called “F–k Yeah, Feminists” that was “very, very adamant on getting us off YouTube and making us stop making videos,” says Kong.
“What they’ll do is they’ll pile onto our videos,” says Jesse, “and they’ll flag them, or they’ll down-vote them, or they’ll report them in masses, like in feminist masses.”
So what can you do if someone hates your videos?
Turn to your fans
Go to your community and rally against a common enemy.
After the F–k Yeah, Feminists blog published a post calling Kong and Jesse misogynists, they decided to email it to their fans.
“We thought, why don’t we just email it to them and poke fun at it?” says Kong. “All [our] fans were sticking up for us…it made their love for SimplePickup even stronger because now it’s an us-against-them mentality. It’s, like, we’re on a team and we’ve got to battle against this.”
“Just to clarify,” says Jesse, “usually when feminists don’t like what we do it’s because they don’t watch the videos. They just hear [about what we] said out of context.”
Written by April Dykman. Production notes by Jeremy Weisz.