

Online course: Viral Academy
Duration: 21 hours
Assignments: 40
Most people believe that starting a successful YouTube channel is all luck. In reality, there’s actually quite a bit of science to it. Viral Academy is a step-by-step 12 week program that walks students through how to come up with a channel idea with viral potential, how to write and produce that content using proven patterns of virility, then monetize their channel so that it can become a full-time career.

My roles in creating this course:
Lead writer: I interviewed 7 full-time YouTubers across a wide range of niches. We wanted every single student, no matter what their hobbies or interests were, to feel informed and excited to apply the information they learned. I wrote a detailed, comprehensive program walking students through every part of the YouTube content creation process: coming up with a channel idea with viral potential, how to write and film their ideas, how to get featured by blogs, and monetize their channel beyond Adsense. Once finalized, the scripts were filmed with our YouTube experts and edited by our production team.
Creative director: I managed every part of the creative process, including: writing the visuals into the script, creating and enforcing a design style guide, conceptualizing our sets, finding or building locations scratch, and managing our post-production team of video editors, motion graphics artists, and graphic designers.
Launch manager: I created a product launch timeline that our engineering, production, marketing, and operations team used to stay on track. I also created the full marketing funnel needed to share this course with the world. This included writing the pre-launch video content, email marketing funnel, sales page copy, and video sales letter. We re-launched this course many, many times - resulting in many wildly different funnels with different hypotheses. (For more info on my marketing experience, please see my marketing projects!)

Lessons from the course:
Module 2, Video 1:
What is Virality?
I know, virality seems like a whole lot of luck and not much else. But, what if I told you there is actually a repeatable, testable science to going viral?

Module 4, video 2:
Remixing Viral Content & Trending Topics
Many people believe that in order to create viral content, it needs to be 100% original. It has to be something that’s never been seen or done before. This is actually a terrible way to approach content. Instead, you should use the Remix Strategy.