My greatest fear

Spiders. Snakes. Tall buildings.

For many, these are the ultimate nightmare, but they have nothing on my greatest fear: public speaking. It's an insecurity that has plagued me for most of my life, compounded with the stutter that I've had since birth.

So when I became serious about being an author, I dreaded promoting myself through social media.

If talking to a small classroom was a challenge, imagine doing that in front of potentially millions of people. Despite it all, I pushed through my anxiety to create a TikTok account and gave myself the challenge of releasing a daily video for a month.

Those daily videos were time consuming, exhausting and overall, not very effective. When the challenge ended, I deleted the video series and swore off using TikTok forever.

Less than a year later, I am returning to the platform.

The inspiration for my return came from an Instagram ad promising to teach viral content creation.

It seemed too good to be true. How could you guarantee your content going viral?

I was very skeptical but very also curious. So I decided to check out the program.

As a student of copywriting, I saw all the standard tricks of the trade: the limited time discount, the numerous upsells to turn a $60 purchase into several hundreds of dollars, etc., etc.

I also saw someone wanting to build a legitimate business. They had a large TikTok following on their account and a 30 day money back guarantee.

With the course on sale for $60, I thought, why not?

Over the course of two afternoons, my mind was blown.

The lessons from TMS Productions were clear, concise and explained everything that I was doing wrong. With a debut novel being released in less than a year, I decided it was worth giving TikTok another shot.

The Most Important Lesson:

It wouldn't be fair if I shared everything I learned from the course. Instead, I will share the one lesson I found the most interesting: understanding what makes a video go viral.

At it's heart, going viral is about creating content that people want to watch (often more than once). This is represented by the metric watch time.

Creating a viral video begins with a good idea.

There are four factors that determine if you have a good idea for a video. While you don't need all four factors, the more, the merrier.

The Four Factors of Virality:

1) Relatability: You're more likely to stick around and watch a video if it relates to your life experiences or something you already know.

2) Creating Questions: The video should create questions in the audience that they will stick around to see answered.

3) Invoking Emotion: A video should create an emotional reaction in the audience. Bonus points if you also include emotional reactions within the video.

4) Impossible: The video should include something that seems impossible. This is anything that would make you say "No way!" out loud.

With these four factors in mind, you can start breaking down popular videos to understand why they became popular. And once you're able to do that, you can start making your own.

By the time this newsletter is released, my first new TikTok videos of the year should be uploaded to my account.

It will take some practice to create the type of videos that go viral but I am more committed even ever to facing my greatest fear.

Until next time,