wait a sec how many views have you gotten in the last 2 months over a quar of a billion views how many subscribers have you gotten 1. 2 million starting from basically nothing yeah meet Sam a 15-year-old who has officially solved YouTube shorts he's got over 1. 2 million subscribers and over 270 million views and the crazy thing is it's only taken him 3 months and then just to show off and prove it wasn't luck he started another Channel and went from 0 to 160,000 subscribers in a little over 30 days so how does he do it well I interrogated Sam to uncover exactly how he makes shorts go viral the specific editing techniques he uses to stop people swiping away how he uncovers viral ideas and a secret engagement hack that explodes his comments in total since you started what kind of stats are you ping in terms of views subscribers subscribers I have recently reached around a million subscribers views I've crossed 200 million views just a few days ago how long did it take you to get those just 2 months do you think that anyone can succeed with shorts if they follow the right process 100% 100% it's very simple the first thing you should look at is searching a good Niche to get into I would literally just spend hours on YouTube scrolling shorts see what's being recommended to me and I would also go into Incognito so I get recommended the best and most engaging content and just watch hours of shorts if I find a viral short and I'm like I could recreate this I would then go onto the channel and if I see that that was their only viral short and and then every other short has like you know a few thousand views then that's probably not a good Niche to get into but then if I go into their Channel and every single video is constantly hitting like millions of views then that's something I'd consider I'd say probably a channel that's almost on every single video is hitting over 500,000 views preferably a million a million to like 10 million then that's probably a good Channel and a good Niche to look into just by watching maybe 30 minutes of that Channel's content you are then going to be recommended hundreds of other videos from other channels within the same Niche so then after I would watch his content i' would probably just reload YouTube and see what's on my homepage and if I see other similar videos that are from a different channel in the same Niche I would then watch those and then for every channel that I do find I'll subscribe to those channels so I can go back to them or I'll just keep the link open and I'll just create a new tab I probably wouldn't get into an ISE where there's more than five really big creators with like hundreds of thousands of subscribers who are hitting millions of views but then if there's like 50 accounts where there's like a few hundred or a few th000 subscribers then I wouldn't really worry about that because they don't really impact you that much you want to compete with the biggest not the people that have hundreds of subscribers how much time would you say that you've spent studying different shorts and like how many shorts did it take you to kind of like really nail down your formula and fine-tune your intuition for virality it probably took took me around a few months of studying shorts while also posting my own shorts and trying to put in new things that I have learned from watching other people's shorts into my newer shorts yeah it doesn't have to be hours even if you're just scrolling like 10 minutes a day maybe that would probably get you there you will find some really good niches and channels where you could probably compete in if you're entering a new Niche and your competitors are like obviously hitting millions of views or even hundreds of thousands and you're not yet what you're aiming to do is create videos that could be posted onto your competitor's channels and no one would realize like the quality is the same what is it that you're trying to copy or model like how do you actually go about stealing and repurposing those ideas I have to make it unique so it's not like completely directly copying but I will almost create the exact same sh but in my style and you probably see it a lot like thousands of people copying MrBeast and there's even like hundreds of people trying to copy me using similar titles or just general ideas or using the same phrases or words within their videos you just want to look at their short what they've titled it and slightly change it when I first started I directly copied my competitors I would look at their latest videos what they titled how long they were for how fastpaced they were and also how recently they posted those videos and I compare them to the amount of views they got you will notice why that video went viral and you sort of just want to replicate that video whether it's the idea or editing style I take the best parts from their channels and then start thinking of ideas from my own shorts go to five of your competitors's channels look at their most viral videos and take bits and pieces from all of them to create your own video which has a really high chance of going viral so sometimes I'll go ahead and literally just take their most viewed video I'll copy their script and then I'll replace all their content with my own but it's still following the same formula it sort of gave me an understanding of how to create these viral sort of Concepts and ideas so if you're a beginner if you have only a few hundred subscribers or even a few thousand directly copying some of the top creators can actually be very beneficial and over time your style will sort of just develop and you'll adapt in your own way I want to play devil's advocate for a minute because there are two cans there are people who say you should model what works because the amount of things that don't work are far more humorous than the things that do on the other hand there's also a camp of people that say be as unique as possible and that's how you stand out that's how you'll be successful what would you say to someone who is like no no no you should just be as unique as possible and don't copy anyone being extremely unique and completely different to everyone else these days it's almost impossible there's most likely someone who's already done it before so in a way you're always going to be like the second person to do it you're never going to be completely original that's just up to them if that's what they believe that's right but I feel like it'll be a lot harder to gain any success than if you're going to copy others or at least take ideas from a bunch of other people to sort of create your own content what are the specific elements that you pay the most attention to when I create a sh obviously you need the hook which should be around 2 to 5 seconds and then you should explain a bit more so viewers understand what they're watching and why they should continue watching so in the hook you want something unexpected whether it's weird funny or just doesn't really make sense then you sort of want to get on to revealing to them why they should watch the short like what they're going to see at the end like sort of hint at what's going to happen but don't exactly reveal it to them so they'll want to say till the end then you want to deliver cuz if you don't then they'll just scroll away and they'll be unhappy they're not going to like your video and they're not going to want to comment either you'd probably see it in MrBeast shorts you sort of see the first second something crazy happens and then obviously by the end of the video he delivers and it's exactly what's said in the title and it was genuinely interesting where people would want to stay and watch until the end is there a way that you sort of gauge whether or not something is interesting or controversial or random enough to work versus like something else that isn't like how do you figure that out I think that just comes naturally over time from studying shorts and also Al studying your own shorts that you've posted but what I am aware of is that I do have a good understanding of the levels of how interesting it has to be but I can't really exactly explain it so you see what has worked in the past what is working for you even if you're not getting millions of views chances are you've probably gotten like 10,000 views on one of your videos but every other video gets like 500 views you did something in that 10,000 view video that got you that 10,000 views and you want to find out what that thing was and then replicator in every video that you post in the future for shorts generally just fastpaced things tend to do a lot better than kind of slow so with your voice over you want to be talking fast or speed it up in your editing software you just look at other shorts and how fast the pacing is like where every cut is how often they transition into a new scene are they talking for longer than 5 Seconds without switching the visual part of the screen and you want to apply the same to your video even if you're in like the gaming Niche or something you can look at cooking or something and you just look at how often the screen transitions into something else and you just apply that into your own video for you is there like a general best practice I wouldn't say there's like a amount you should have but I probably wouldn't keep something on the screen for like longer than 5 seconds so one sentence should be shorter than 5 Seconds one of them could probably be longer but it has to be a good sentence it has to be be something that provides value and will keep the viewer listening in terms of length of time my videos are generally around 40 to 50 seconds how did you decide to make 40 to 50 second long videos I just looked at my competitors and looked at their most viral videos and they just happened to be that long I just emulated that I made my voice over that long and just a general video that long because that's what I was working for my competitors assuming you have a good idea General content decent hook that kind of stuff what are some of the most important things that you do that help you go violent get more views in your opinion the other day I was actually on the bus and I was watching a guy scroll YouTube shorts and one of my videos popped up on his screen he wasn't wearing headphones or anything so he was obviously just reading the captions that were on the screen and if there were no captions he would have just scrolled straight past my video captions on the video are extremely important you want nice bold Big Font and you preferably want all caps so it's easier to read and then another thing I do is I often encourage people to comment on my videos what is it about getting people to leave comments on videos that you think helps the video blow up when they're commenting the video is still playing in the background for them even if they're just reading a bunch of other people's comments the video May replay like two or three times until they finish reading all the comments and they decide to scroll away so they've just given you like 200 300% average reation I think a lot of people think about comments as in like the more comments you can get the more engagement the algorithm sees so the more it pushes you short yeah it doesn't really matter about the amount it's more about people just scrolling and spending time on the video itself I have specific ways in which I get my viewers to comment for my videos you just have to act like you don't know the answer to something say something simple or easy that should make sense to you but you act like you don't understand it then people will often want to go to the comments to like you know not say you're stupid but like they just want to prove you wrong and say oh you're wrong this is wrong and you know this is right so that's quite a good tactic sometimes or you can say something that's wrong so if you say incorrect information that gets a lot of comments as well cuz people are just like oh that that doesn't make sense you're wrong cuz they just want to point it out it's just something people like doing so that's one thing another thing is a lot of the time saying something funny will make people go straight to the comments and point that out like oh there's this funny Point At You Know 30 seconds of the video which I find interesting like it's just like a random funny line it can be a word or two and people will not notice that and point that out in the comments and laugh about it so I leave one or two funny things generally around after the first sentence then I'll have maybe two more sentences and then another joke or call to action so like a comment or a subscribe thing it will get you a lot of subscribers as well like a lot more than if you don't ask for them you mentioned that every Niche has different strategies that you can use to kind kind of creatively get comments without revealing what your channel is what are some of the specific strategies or calls to action that you use to creatively get comments or to get people into the comments so that they then get caught up reading other people's comments and like watch your videoos 600 times saying things like it's impossible to do this and it's obviously not it's a very easy thing to do anyone can do it so me saying it's impossible will make people go to the comments wanting to prove me wrong so they just end up commenting and that just gave me a comment and there's a bunch of people going like haha I did it you said it's impossible but I did it that just gets you comments so saying it's impossible to do something but it's actually really easy to do that thing that will get you a lot of comments and that also helps boost your video and then at the end I'd often end the video with like a question or point something out that sort of doesn't make sense where viewers go to the comments to look for answers in your experience I know you tried out like a bunch of different call to AC comment challenges what would you say are like the top two to three specific ones that you think had the biggest impact something that can apply to everyone from all over the world so everyone can participate is best so something to do with name age or even just country where they're from so if you say comment where you're from or something and see how many other people are from that same country or something like that everyone watching the video can participate it applies to everyone and then there's time so you say what time is it for you right now and people will go and look at their phone while they're checking their time your video is still playing so that's giving you extra audience retention you know they check their time at 6:00 p.
m. so they go and comment 600 p. m.
and then 10 other people it's 6 p. m.
