SPI 810: Your Best Chance at Going Viral

SPI 810: Your Best Chance at Going Viral

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host,, he uses please and thank you when prompting AI, just in case. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: I want to share a strategy that’s been working, not just on YouTube, but on a lot of other platforms that you might see, especially social media as well.

And it has to do with this idea of what is being called an outlier. An outlier. So an outlier obviously is something that is sort of different than the norm. And on YouTube, the strategy is this. You go to another YouTube channel, it may or may not be in the same niche as you. But you go to another YouTube channel, and every YouTube channel has its own sort of baseline or foundation of views that every video, kind of in general, has.

There’s actually a really great tool that MrBeast himself had launched. Obviously he had a team and he’s not a developer himself, but he’s a genius when it comes to YouTube and knows exactly what a tool like this should be. I highly recommend it. I’m not an affiliate or anything. But it’s ViewStats.com.

This is a major competitor to what you might have heard before, something called Social Blade. It also in a way competes with TubeBuddy and VidIQ and a lot of those kinds of tools. Again, ViewStats.com. You can use this to help you with some of the research that you might do on other people’s channels.

And the Pro Plan actually has an outliers tool, to go into another person’s channel and find these outlier videos. So an outlier video, and you don’t need this tool to do this. I was doing this before this tool even existed and getting some help and it’s been working. And I, again, just wanted to pass this strategy onto you in case you hadn’t heard it yet.

And again, it can work on social, but it works really well on YouTube too. So every YouTube channel has a baseline of how many views you might normally get with a regular average video. However, every once in a while, you’ll see an outlier video. A video that just for whatever reason, seems to get a lot more views.

And a lot more reach. Where normally views might be in the one or two thousands. An outlier might be in the ten or twenty thousands, right? Just one video out of that lot. You see that, and it’s like, whoa, what happened there? If a person normally gets, you know, ten to twenty thousand views per video, there might be one that Is that a million, right?

The scale of the outlier doesn’t really matter more than just, it is a different reach versus the normal, regular average videos on that channel. You want to pay attention to that outlier because that is a key to potentially gathering information that can help you with the content that you are creating.

You’ll see these outliers on TikTok. On a person’s channel or account, you’ll see this on Instagram. You’ll see this on Facebook. Definitely something to pay attention to LinkedIn, all the places. Examine those outliers, really try to determine why that was the case. And on YouTube, because I know YouTube very well, oftentimes it is a really, really good, combination of a title and thumbnail along with a video that supports the promise of that title in the thumbnail Probably the classic one and I say that I mean, that’s not a lot of people investigated this but I did but I call it a classic one because I’ve talked about it before in the past Brady Brandwood who is a creator who’s been on the platform for over a decade on YouTube a few years ago created a video titled Can I raise a grocery store lobster as a pet or buying a grocery store lobster and raising it as a pet?

Something. Of that nature and The thumbnail was a lobster with the classic rubber band around its claw. And it really created and painted an interesting thought and a picture in a person’s mind who might come across that thumbnail. And where his other videos were getting anywhere between 2 to 5 thousand, some 10 thousand, this one has 18 million views.

18 million. It’s, I think it’s over 20 now at this point. And this is of course, the Leon the Lobster. The grocery store lobster that he purchased, he brought home. The editing is not great. It’s filmed on an iPhone and it told a really great story. And subsequent videos have been created on Brady’s channel, Brady Brandwood.

And every time it’s about Leon the Lobster, he gets millions of views. And it all started with that one outlier video. Again, that’s just an example of an outlier video, but you can go into that. You can, you can begin to examine. Okay, what made this title really great? What made this thumbnail really great?

And in many cases, maybe not necessarily that particular example, because that is a very specific story. However, I have seen other channels create similar types of videos where a person might purchase quail eggs from a Whole Foods, and actually one of them, after incubating for a number of weeks, will actually hatch, which is pretty amazing, and then raising it.

So, kind of taking inspiration from Leon the Lobster. But in my case, with my Pat Flynn YouTube channel, and even the Deep Pocket Monster Pokemon YouTube channel, seeing what the outliers have been in other niches, other people’s channels and borrowing that format, right? Not, obviously not copying because I mean, it’s in a different niche.

If you were to create the same video, it would just not make sense. But taking that structure, taking that organization, taking that idea of the title and thumbnail and the story that it can tell. How might you create a story that would make sense for your audience? So on the Pat Flynn channel, for example, @PatFlynn, I recently published a video.

If I started a personal brand in 2024, I’d do this. Well, this title was structured based on somebody else who was teaching people how to do social media. If I started social media in 2024, I do this. So I took that framework. It worked along with a thumbnail that showed this person in front of a whiteboard.

And these two things together, I knew were going to work if I nailed the title and thumbnail But also the intro and really hooking people in, in the beginning. And that video has done very, very well in just two weeks, 30,000 views where my baseline is under 10 for this channel. Another video that was published, how I made 237 K in only 63 hours, five income streams revealed.

That’s another one that was based on somebody else in another space who was sharing how much revenue they were making from TikTok. That blew up because again, we noticed this because it was an outlier. On the Deep Pocket Monster YouTube channel, there’s an engineer. His name is Louis Weiss. He created a video titled, I cooked a chicken by slapping it.

And this was a video that was based on a lot of theory around the idea that if you slap a chicken fast enough, it’ll warm up. And then if. You know, if you do it long enough or fast enough, will it actually cook? And so he decided to test it. And I decided to take that framework and bring it into the Pokémon space and test some theories about certain things.

For example, when you get your graded cards, or when you get your Pokémon cards authenticated and graded by these grading companies, they move a little bit on the inside. And a lot of people were curious for years. I looked it up on Reddit and people were discussing whether or not this actually damaged the cards inside.

It had the ability to shake and you can clearly and distinctly hear it. So I decided to follow the same structure and framework as this video, which has 15 million views. Lewis’s does, mine has two, but for a brand new Pokemon channel, it worked really, really well. So again, this idea of finding the outliers, what are the outlier videos in YouTube channels in your space.

And it doesn’t mean that you also have to have a YouTube channel in order to make this work. You can actually examine a person’s YouTube channel to see what’s working on their stuff. What is an outlier and take inspiration from that and bring that over to your own social platform to your own LinkedIn for example because it’s hooking people in the right way the combination of the visual the thumbnail with that particular way that title is structured promises something and if you can nail that promise and then of course in the format of wherever it is that you’re publishing it deliver on that promise, then it could work very well.

One thing that I’m experimenting with right now, by the time this episode comes out, I’ll already have the answer to this, but there is a video that went really, really viral on my Pokemon channel. It was titled The correct way to store Pokemon cards in a binder. Very specific, but also 3 million views because of the way it was structured.

It drew curiosity for this particular niche, right? People don’t believe there’s a wrong way to do this, but I’m saying no, there is a wrong way. And the thumbnail is a binder with an arrow saying you’re storing it wrong, or you’re doing it wrong. And then the hook really hooks people in. So I want to take that, which is an outlier video on the Pokemon channel and bring it to the Pat Flynn channel.

So the video that I’m going to be working on very soon is the correct way to sell anything online. And then on the thumbnail, it’s going to show something that it’s seemingly obvious. It’s going to show audience and an arrow pointing from audience like the word audience to email list and then an email list that will point to then sell product and it will all be scratched out.

It’s like, wait, no, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Build an audience, create an email list, sell a product. Wait, that’s wrong? Click on the video to find the correct way to sell anything online. Right? It kind of touches on all the intrigue and curiosity there. And you’re welcome to borrow that too, because again, this is, you know, just don’t copy the video, obviously.

But take inspiration from the frameworks that are already proven out there. Back when I was a blogger more than anything, this is early 2010s, there were so many incredibly valuable blog posts from people saying here are 20 blog posts that you can write, here are 20 titles that you can put for blog posts, here are 20 different topics that you could write about for your blog, and it was, were so helpful, we’re not seeing a lot of that kind of stuff anymore, outside of social media.

As far as frameworks and things like that, but looking at the outliers that exist on other channels on social media and people’s channels and accounts, that can be a tell tale sign that, hey, that worked for some reason, let’s see if we can take inspiration and borrow that. So give that a shot, use outliers and it could be the greatest thing ever.

Best of luck to you and I look forward to talking to you in the next episode. Cheers. Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!