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6-Step Formula to a Billion Views: Adley Kinsman Viral Video Secrets

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This content outlines a proven six-step formula for creating viral organic videos, emphasizing the importance of strategic content creation, audience engagement, and data-driven testing to maximize reach and impact for brands and creators.

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We would split test every video,

not on the page that we were gonna post it on.

We would actually run Facebook ads,

dark posts on other pages,

and I would put about five, $6 on each variation.

So if I'm gonna shoot a video, I'm either shooting three

or four different hooks, different opening shots.

'cause I may think the flash forward

of the guy getting the shaving cream in the face.

Is, is the opening shot, but it's also a payoff.

It is that too much. Do people care?

I would test that hook versus getting right into it.

I would test the opening shots

and I would test different links on my video.

Is it better as a 32nd video or a 62nd video?

Today, I am very excited to be joined by Adley Kinsman.

If you don't know who Adley is,

she is a viral video strategist

who specializes in helping brands and celebrities go viral.

Her course is called The Billion View Formula,

and it's designed to help creators

and entrepreneurs leverage viral video.

Adley, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Hey Michael, I'm so happy to be here.

I'm super excited that you're here today.

Adley and I are gonna share a proven method to creating

viral organic videos.

Now, before we get started, we need to hear your story.

How in the world did you get into video?

Start wherever you wanna start. Oh

Man. I love this

question because obviously not everybody just

comes outta the womb as a viral video

scientist, engineer, whatever you wanna call

It. I don't know of anyone having

done that.

We all get where we, where we are somehow or another.

Um, and I bet like many other people's stories is something,

uh, I fell into.

Um, but I, there is a larger backstory here,

but I'll start with the one that I think matters to most

of you, uh, which is really begins during Covid.

I was making videos for a long time.

Um, you know, I was vlogging for like 13 people that cared

for a year, but I just loved it coming

from a musical background.

I was on the voice before that

and it was very first. Really?

What season? Season two.

Whoa, that's way back. Okay.

If you are new to me, please, for the love of God,

do not go look up that episode.

It is like watching an

or asking an artist

to see the very first picture they ever painted.

I have to ask who judging by that it's

Horrible. Was who were the

judges?

Was Ceelo Green one of 'em or who was it? Do you remember?

Yes, it was slo, it was Christina Aguilera.

It was Adam and it was Blake and I. Okay.

Christina and Blake turned around

and I ended up on Team Blake.

Oh, sweet. Okay. Keep going

with the story. That's so cool.

So that, that's what moved me to Nashville

and got me into the field of entertainment.

Spent the next eight years in entertainment touring.

Uh, was songwriting down on Music Row,

had an office on music row.

But overall, like the theme

of it was being really frustrated by a suit behind a desk,

like waiting to give me permission to be successful,

to entertain people, and if it was all

on somebody else's terms.

Um, and like anybody with an entrepreneurial spirit,

when you know that you're good at something

and you're just having to sit back and

and wait, it's very frustrating.

And to be honest, I was always more interested

and more fired up by how to market the music

that I was making than I ever was by making it.

Mm-hmm. I was like, what good is it sitting on my phone

or on my computer if no one ever hears it?

Right. So that's what I tried to really focus on

and got really fired up by really unique ways

to get people to hear what I was up to.

And, uh,

so I was making videos even while I was touring with Blake Shelton.

We went out on a mid-size stadium tour,

like played Penn State Stadium, Iowa University.

We were just playing all these college football stadiums

and started making videos on the road.

And in a nutshell, this is such a nutshell,

but I put chickens in a bathtub one night

and did a hundred thou,

I gained a hundred thousand followers in 24 hours,

and I did 19 million views.

And that is when the light bulb went off for me of, wow,

this is how I can get in front of millions of people

with an authentic, my authentic story

and a point of relatability,

and then I can just turn on a camera

and I can actually get paid for it

and I can entertain on my own terms.

Holy crap. And that was really the light bulb for me

that got me into making videos.

And then I started, you know, just trying to do it over

and over again and learned this different side

of storytelling and maybe the musical

songwriting background helped.

Um, I'm sure that it did.

But this felt like storytelling

with no parameters and no rules.

And I could reiterate, um,

and continue to do test new messaging.

I mean, I could do 18 videos a day, right.

And I taught myself editing and all these different things.

Um, but I was averaging around 20 18, 20 19,

we were averaging about 20 million views a week.

Wow. Which I was blown away by.

It was five years of like, nobody watching, nobody caring,

but me just loving it and saying, gimme enough time

and I will crack this code.

I don't know when, I don't know God's timing,

but I love it enough

and I have a passion enough for it

that I'm going to figure it out.

And then it was probably about the five year mark

around when Covid hit

and, you know, everybody

was just at home sitting on their phones.

And we went from averaging 20 million views a week

to over 200 million views a week.

Okay. It was over a billion views a month.

And we've sustained a billion views a month in organic

content of all different niches,

all different styles since 2020 going on five years now.

Wow. Okay. So bring us up to what you're doing now.

Like, um, wonderful stories.

So now what are you doing

with all these things that you've learned?

So now, never meant to start a company,

but it's happened to us

and I've had to learn so many new skill sets.

Um, but we have a company called Ish,

and there's really three different divisions

of ish OG ish is if you're watching on video,

what you can see behind me,

we have about seven gold plaques from YouTube,

which is channels that owe over a million subscribers.

We have about 37 million owned subscribers

that we built from the ground up cross platform.

We syndicate to about 75

to a hundred million plus followers every single day.

And that's how we're continuing to create

and distribute over a billion organic views a month.

So that's kind of OG is creation

and distribution creator management.

Um, and then, you know what,

like, I mean, how do I scale this?

I can't just wake up and make 18 videos a day anymore.

You know, what if I get sick? What,

what if I wanna take a vacation?

And so we started training more creators how

to do this once it became so formulaic for us.

And I'm really excited to break this down for you guys

because we use the same formula no matter

what video we are creating.

I don't care if it's an ad for Land Rover, a video

for Charmin, if we're staging a Karen on an airplane,

crazy things caught on ring camera

or I'm just pranking my husband.

The same formula works for all of them.

So once we established that, we, I wanted

to train more people how to do this

because once you change your own life,

it really is natural human behavior to wanna turn around

and show everybody else how to do this

because it's not fun to win alone.

So we taught all of our friends and family how to do it.

Everybody makes videos full-time still to this day,

uh, which feels really great.

But we started making these videos,

started educating people,

and then as I'm sure you understand,

it gets very tiring training one-on-one or one-on three.

I did that for a couple years

and I didn't wanna put it all into a course

like everybody was telling me to.

'cause I was really afraid, Michael,

of becoming like this guru

who just sells information even though we had, we were

so credentialed in it.

Um, but I didn't want to be seen that way.

But I got tired enough and enough people got in my ear,

they were like, Adly, just pack, teach it one time,

package it up, and now you can scale it to,

you could be a viral creator anywhere, right?

You can have viral creators all over the world.

And so that was, that was attractive enough.

And I was tired enough to

where I was like, all right, I'm gonna do it.

Uh, so we put, we packaged this into a remote training

program for creators.

Well, when we started running ads,

it attracted 95% business owners.

So I'm like, oh crap.

Like this is a totally different avatar

than who I made it for.

But all these, you know, boring businesses

or even big businesses, they need to know how

to story tell on social media too.

So we've continued to adapt it.

We have a, we have our Pro billion view course,

we have our training program, a recurring program.

We have my mastermind,

and then we have all these brands coming to us,

some I mentioned earlier, uh, first form,

which I'm drinking right now, being one of them.

And we'll guarantee, for example,

first form 10 million views a month, minimum baseline.

I mean, viral is viral, right?

So, but at least 10 million views a month integrating

largely their energy drinks into viral content

and viral communities at scale.

So that's our done for you.

We only take on about eight of those clients a year

because we're still a very small lean team.

But that's a, a good example of viral in our flywheel

for attention solutions for brands and creators.

All right. This is amazing

and I am super excited that you got a chance to share

that amazing story.

Now, I wanna ask an important question.

Why should marketers 'cause most people listening

to the show, we've got

entrepreneurs and creators, but mm-hmm.

Most of them identify as marketers.

Why should they be creating organic viral videos?

You know, because maybe

that's not their ideal target audience, right?

So talk to me a little bit about why that's so important.

100%. Well, lemme just ask you this.

If I offered you one free billboard with your brand

or your face on it in Nashville,

or I offered you 100 free billboards in

Nashville, which one are you gonna choose?

Which brand is gonna get the most

awareness, visibility, and leads?

The hundred, The 100 billboards. Right?

And so if you are gonna make content anyways,

what we teach people is listen, try these tips.

They are tried and true and tested.

We have produced thousands and thousands

and thousands of viral videos.

We use the same formula for all of them.

I'm not saying the tips I'm gonna show you today are going

to make every video instantly go viral,

but I am telling you it will significantly

increase your batting average.

And it's not just about creating viral videos,

it's about creating more compelling content awareness.

If we can get more awareness for a brand more awareness

and attention equals leads, equals sales.

And so the more organic content you can make

and the better you can make it, you're gonna be able

to test your messaging and you're gonna iterate at scale

and with speed in front of thousands

and thousands and thousands of people.

Um, so we just help you at our core

become better storytellers.

Well, and I also think there's another angle here

that a lot of people don't consider,

which is brand awareness, right?

So maybe your video goes viral

and um, your sister or your mother

or your daughter sees the video, right?

But they might know somebody

who might want that product, right?

And that is kind of like, Hey, I remember so

and so telling me about this thing, right?

And then all of a sudden there,

there's a basic marketing principle

that most everybody understands.

People buy products from those whom they know first,

it's whom they know, right?

And then they like, and then they trust.

So if they know or someone knows of that brand

because it was somehow in a video that went viral,

it's going to radically increase the likelihood

they're gonna wanna do business with them. Would you agree?

Uh, that's so well said. Absolutely.

And a lot of people are, I'm a little bit controversial in

my stance that everybody's saying you need

to call out your avatar in the first seven seconds.

Like speak directly to your very, very niche audience.

And I really swing the other way.

There is a place for middle

and bottom of the funnel content

where you are just niched down right away.

Sure. But I'm gonna say, I mean, 60% plus of your content

or more should be top of funnel content

because I'm, I'm not a mom, I don't have kids yet,

but when mom content goes really, really wide top of funnel

and makes a widely relatable piece of content,

it ends up in my algorithm.

I'm, to your point, I'm sending it

to all the other moms in my life.

Like, holy crap, this just came up my feed.

You would love this. This is so funny. Or this is great.

Wow. Johnny would love this, right?

I'm sending it to those moms.

And algorithmically what that does for you,

even if you're talking to it, gets served

to somebody who's not your core audience.

Shares are so heavily weighted right now in the distribution

of the algorithm shares and helping,

and especially what the ones that come from hitting explore,

it's gonna help you find more lookalike audiences.

So really what we help people do is get really great at

their top of funnel awareness content,

because I don't need to tell you this

and I probably don't even need

to tell the other marketers that are listening to this.

You already know that we are in the greatest wave

of free advertising that the world has ever seen.

So if you're gonna make 30 pieces of content a month,

or if you're gonna make three,

use these tips we're gonna get into today

to help 10 x your reach out of the gate.

I don't even care if you use three

of the probably 15 we're gonna talk about.

Right? If you get the other half of them,

like this is gonna be head knowledge today.

The other side of that is execution.

But if you get your reps in

and start executing on some of these,

there's no way you're not gonna see a difference.

I, I haven't seen it yet.

I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it.

Okay, so you've got a really cool process

and let's just kind of start

with the first step. Where do we begin?

Okay, so what our billion view formula is essentially is

six simple steps that when combined are going

to drastically increase your batting average

for quote unquote going viral.

Now, viral is a word that is very subjective, right?

I asked, I had asked the kid the other day,

he told me he went viral.

He was so pumped using one of our tips.

And, uh, I said, that's so cool.

What, what is just outta curiosity? What is viral to you?

What's the video at? And he said, 40,000 views.

And he was used to averaging three to 400 views.

Or, you know, maybe a couple thousand, 40,000 views

to him was, was viral that he had never seen that before.

Such an outlier, right?

And viral to us is anything maybe over 5 million.

So it is a relative thing, I think to everybody.

Um, so just keep that in mind. But it is six simple steps.

So we'll go through each of them.

The first one being obviously you guys could fill in the

blanks, it's the hook, right?

And why does everybody talk about the hook?

It's because if you don't get it right,

literally nothing else

that we talk about today is gonna matter.

Nothing. And I could teach you this anchoring tactic.

I could teach you these things to do

to increase your engagement

and raise the stakes, which I will.

But so this girl to me, she came up the other day

and she goes, add, I, you know,

tried your anchoring technique

and suspense, and you know what?

It didn't work. 'cause the video tanked.

And I said, okay, show me. Show show me your retention line.

She pulls it up. I'm like, well, yeah, Becky, of course.

No, it didn't work. You lost 75%

of people in your first four seconds.

No one even saw it. No one even made it that far. Right?

So it, it is the hook.

Um, and so what our number one thing that we want you guys

to do, if you get nothing else from this call,

I want your goal today to be, to get 90% retention

on your first six seconds in your hook.

That is what we're aiming for.

And that does come directly from our TikTok rep,

but we've tested it and it runs

parallel to every major algorithm.

If you can get 90% retention on your first six seconds,

you're gonna be well on top 1%

of all content being offered up

and distributed across the algorithm.

It is very hard to do.

So a lot of people like, well, yeah, A okay, cool.

Sounds easy. We don't have thousands of

viral videos under our belt, right?

Um, so what we teach people to do in order to do

that is something that we'll call the combo method.

There's a lot of ways to be really sticky in a hook

and try to get that 90% retention on the first six seconds.

Uh, but let's break down

what the combo method is really when you're trying

to get 90% retention on the first six seconds.

Yes, that is very difficult,

but it's like my mom taught me in high school, right?

We're gonna set the bar so high adley so that when you fall,

when you make a mistake

and you don't get it perfectly right,

you're only gonna fall here, not all the way back down.

So if you get 82% retention on your first six seconds,

you're still doing pretty great.

Okay? But we're gonna aim for 90.

So before you ever make a video, say,

how am I gonna get every fricking person who thumbs,

scrolls across this video to stop and hook them in, right?

Every hook has to have two things.

These are non-negotiables. Write these down.

If you're taking notes, it has to have an emotion.

It has to elicit an emotional response from the viewer, has

to, has to, and it has to have a curiosity gap.

You're gonna create an itch that you're not gonna scratch

until the last few seconds of your video.

So has to create an emotion, has to have a curiosity gap.

And the easiest way that we've found to do that is

through something that we've coined the combo method,

which essentially is combining two things

that don't normally go together, right?

I'm an entertainer first, not an educator.

Um, and I just am an entertainer who so happens

to have a deep, deep passion for relaying the knowledge of

how we entertain successfully.

Um, but for me, if you are looking at my Instagram,

I'm taking a rack of ribs

and I'm putting it on the engine

of a car in the opening shot.

Okay? So that is two things

that don't normally belong together.

They do elicit a curiosity gap of

what the hell is she doing?

And they do spark an emotion.

Like, you shouldn't be doing that. What are you doing?

Like, it is, it is a shock value thing for me, right?

Shock value is, is a really strong way to go.

Um, if you're doing Talking Head podcast clipping type

content, educational style content,

it could be combining two things that don't go together,

like ideologies, like controversial statements, right?

Uh, Dr. Julie is an example I use a lot.

She's an educator, but she does really awesome visuals

to combine two things that don't go together.

She'll be, she'll take a sharpie

and start drawing on her hand

and on her body putting a sharpie on her skin,

which you should not normally do.

And she'll, she'll be talking about trauma

and what trauma does and looks like in the body and healing.

So she's doing really heavy topics,

but she's anchoring you with a what are you doing?

Why are you drawing on your body?

And she's eliciting a curiosity gap to figure out

where she's going with that, right?

What is the resolve? What are we gonna realize she's drawing

on her body about what conclusion is she getting to?

Um, so that's what we mean when we talk about the combo

method being a great way

to land anybody's attention in the hook.

So talk to me about the emotional response side of it,

because that feels a little harder for me to grasp.

I totally understand doing something, two things together

that seem completely incongruent.

Mm-hmm. But how do you get

that emotional response also going in there?

If I said it's really, I was trying to see if it applies

to you two things here.

So if I am, if I'm a a guy

or a girl, I want to, I wanna position my first line,

my hook line in a way that appeals to both parties.

So say 90, um,

I'm just making something up on

the spot trying to make a, well,

You can, you can just give an example

of something you've done, you know,

or anyone else has done to kind

of help explain the emotional side of it, you know,

Uh, sure. Uh, maybe

I say something po politics work really well.

Okay. Say a controversial thing about Taylor Swift.

Something that's widely appealing that is gonna get a No,

it doesn't, or Yeah.

Preach on like something that people

Can agree with I See.

Or disagree with, or have some type of feeling about Yeah.

Right. Or get angry about Right. Anger, fear.

Those are really big emotions that are

A great example would be like Bitcoin.

Okay. Right? You've got people that absolutely love Bitcoin

and you know, you've got people that absolutely hate it

and think it's a complete scam, right?

Like, why you're a financial advisor. I don't know.

You could get creative with that, right?

Like, uh, the financial traditional people are gonna say,

that's a scam, you know,

and then you've got the next generation

that's gonna be like, no, this

is like the biggest thing ever.

You know, I would imagine something

like that. I don't know. Yeah.

So if you say controversial statement about Bitcoin,

you're gonna get Bitcoin advocates being like, yeah,

either on your side or against your side.

But either way, whichever group people are in

and they're really kind of in one group

or the other, they're gonna be curious enough if you do this

sentence right, to stick around

to see if you're proving their point

or if you're teaching them something

new or they disagree with you.

Because the second part of this is when it comes

to eliciting an emotion, I need to define

what emotion I'm wanting the viewer to have.

Am I wanting them to think they're gonna learn something?

That's a big one. Mm-hmm.

Especially for marketers and educators.

Do they think they're gonna learn something

or am I trying to make them laugh?

Like, when people come to my page, my entertainer content,

they usually will click in or they'll usually watch

because they know it, it's gonna make them laugh.

Mm-hmm. It's gonna bring them levity.

So, or is the goal to entertain?

Is that what you wanna make them feel entertained?

Or do you want them to feel,

do you want them to feel afraid?

Do you wanna scare them about some medical protocol so

that they're like, oh no, I gotta

keep watching to see what could happen?

Are we, do we want them to feel afraid so

that they trust you as a thought leader?

What do you want them to feel?

And then once you identify what that emotion is,

do not let off of it.

Don't, don't switch emotions if you're doing recipe content.

Right. The typical thing is I feel like I'm gonna learn

something from this recipe, and I'm gonna wanna know

if it tastes good at the end.

Yeah. If, if I wanna see what it looks like, be recipes,

follow the formula very well, because here's a promise

that I'm making, and I, you're not gonna see the results

until the very end pranks are set up

foundationally the same way.

Here's the shaving cream going into the hand,

and you know that I'm about

to tickle this guy's nose with a feather.

You can understand

what's happening in the first three seconds.

It's not gonna pay off till the very

end where the prank happens.

So some of these formats are just

where organically follow the formula

and then we teach people how to make 'em very strong.

Um, and how their beats throughout

the video are gonna be very strong.

Got it. Um, that's what we mean when we talk

about eliciting and emotion.

Okay. So, so where we're at

so far is step one is the hook, the most important part,

if you do not get 90% as your goal in the first six seconds

of the video, the likelihood that

that video is gonna perform is pretty much not there.

Right? And you teach this method called the combo method,

which is a combination of creating a curiosity gap, things

that don't normally go together

and ideally elicit some sort of a response, right?

And that response, what I'm hearing you say could be

two different sides of a coin if you have like, uh,

two different kind of viewpoints, like serial comma,

no serial comma for my writing community out there.

Mm-hmm. You know, or whatever, right?

Um, or I don't know, organic versus, uh,

GMO food, you know what I mean?

Like, you could, you could pick

something, you know what I mean?

Yes. And, um, or any other kind of like curiosity gap.

And then ideally if there's some emotional angle to it

that's gonna get them to the point where they're gonna stick

around, why does that work, by the way?

Is it because one, is it

because there's an element of story

that you're baking in here as we're,

as we're starting off in the first six seconds?

Absolutely. Definitely story

and just typical human psychology.

Like if I tickle you, Michael,

or I make an itch on you,

all you're gonna be thinking about is scratching that itch.

Yeah. So when we were creating for Facebook,

we are the most viewed female producer

in Facebook and Snapchat history.

And we would, and I owe probably all

of you an apology watching this,

because if you've ever watched a video

that wasted three minutes of your life

and it hooked you, you were scrolling

and you're like, this is so stupid,

but I cannot stop watching.

There is a 99% chance that came from me, somebody I coached,

or one of my peers without.

I'm not even blinking when I say that. I'm so sure.

Um, and so we, I mean, made Facebook change their algorithm

so consistently because we would hijack it.

We were studying so much data that we wanted to see

how far we could push this.

And the marketer in me was so fascinated by

how we could get people to watch crap they hated.

Mm-hmm. And they would do it over and over and over again.

And it really taught me that there is a massive difference

between what people say they wanna watch versus

what they will actually pay attention to.

There's a giant gap.

And so when people were consistently watching

the horrible content, like we were not proud of this,

it was a wonderful experiment for two years as a marketer.

So I could come back and share it with all of you of how

to create insanely compelling content

that people cannot look away from.

And so if you create an itch in people, like a,

just a big enough, shocking enough,

angry enough curiosity gap of some type of story,

I mean, you can make it, you'll,

you're gonna hold their attention.

They psychologically have to see

what the heck is happening here,

what is this gonna turn into?

Where is she going? Like, what is what's gonna happen?

And it can be the dumbest video on the internet,

and most of the time they were.

But if it's story told good enough,

you can make a video watching paint dry.

So, okay, let's, what's the next part of your process?

So after the hook, we go into suspense.

And suspense I really believe is the separator.

Suspense is the difference between good creators

and the best creators in the world.

And with suspense, if you can hold somebody for six seconds,

we, we would have an active practice at wireless

where we would have a six second video.

Like this video should be no longer the six seconds.

We would turn it into an 18 minute long video

with 60% retention that's stupid like this.

And we, our craft

and our separator was, we can take a six second punchline

and we can story tell it so well,

and keep re hooking you every 15, 20 seconds to

where you're just not looking away.

And we'll hold you for as long as we need to.

And the more, the longer we held you on apps like Facebook

and Snapchat, the more money we made.

So we would hold you, we would do anything

to just hold you for more and more seconds. Um,

So how do we do that? How do we,

With suspense?

I I call it, uh, the Missy Elliot method

because in the great words of Missy Elliot,

we're gonna put the thing down.

We're gonna flip it and we're gonna reverse it.

We're gonna teach content design totally backwards than

what most marketers would, most marketers would say,

I'm gonna make a video that is about how

to say 50% on taxes,

or I'm gonna make a video showing my amazing three

ingredient brownie recipe.

Well, what they're describing is the payoff they're

describing the end of the video.

Because even on great videos,

most people are not gonna make it to the, to the end.

You may have 20%

of people still there at the end of the video.

So they're never gonna see that tax strategy.

They're never gonna see that amazing brownie recipe.

So what we do at Ish is if you're gonna pitch a video idea,

you're gonna completely reverse it.

You're gonna describe to me your opening shot.

So what is the opening shot?

And if, uh, if Michael,

you told me you were gonna make a video,

and I said, what's the opening?

And you said, oh, I am gonna crack an egg into a bowl.

'cause you make brownies. I would say, okay,

what's the location you'd say in my kitchen?

And I would say, PR no boring.

I, that's, there's nothing novel. I feel nothing.

There's no curiosity gap.

I've seen an egg being cracked into a bowl.

Uh, how about in, how about on a campground in the middle

of nowhere, like in the forest or something like that,

In a for location?

Well, we're gonna get there, but location is a

beautiful, beautiful tool.

But, and the easiest way to raise the stakes.

But if I, if they, you redescribe this opening shot

and you said, I'm in the aisle at Target.

Ah, okay. And I take eggs right out of the fridge

and I crack it into a jar of Quaker oats

right there in the middle of the

target, right there in the middle of Target.

Oh, okay. I'm interested. I I what's your next beat?

And seconds, you know, four to 10.

And they say, well, then I take a jar of peanut butter

and I take a plastic spoon also off the shelf,

and I take the peanut butter

and I put it right into the jar of rolled oats as well.

I, and is there an employee 10 feet behind you looking at

what you're doing and radioing to someone?

Yes. What an anchor. Now I know security's coming, right?

So now you're hooked. 'cause you, we flash forward

to what is going to happen.

We foreshadowed. So then you're gonna keep doing all of this

and looking really suspicious,

and you're gonna describe your video to me,

mimicking the viewer's experience.

You're gonna take me frame by frame, beat by beat

through your video starting at the top,

because that's the way your viewer's gonna receive it.

So don't tell me what the punchline of the joke is.

Don't tell me what the punchline of the prank is

or the actual strategy.

You're gonna design your video starting at the top,

describing the opening shot, the first sentence,

the second sentence, the third sentence,

and get a focus group of your friends

or those in your office to tell you objectively,

would you still be watching this video?

Am I interesting enough?

And a lot of times people will look to me

or my personal content

and they'll say, Adley, I don't wanna be silly.

I don't wanna make silly videos.

And my answer to that is, you do not have to be,

if our mastermind is full of six

and seven figure entrepreneurs, many

with deep heavy subjects, you do not have to be silly,

but you do have to be interesting.

Okay? There's a very big difference.

So use the focus group around you

and ask them, would you keep watching

and go sentence by sentence with them?

And the second that they say that they would scroll,

you need to change that piece of your video.

Okay? So this is really fascinating to me.

Um, so if I reverse engineer what I'm hearing you say,

the suspense is, it's kind of hard for me

to articulate this, but the suspense is

that you're doing something again,

as we talked about in an unusual setting, right?

Which is part of that hook, right?

This is like you, these two things don't go together, right?

Someone cooking in the aisle at Target doesn't make

a lot of sense, right?

That's gonna grab them in, right? Mm-hmm.

But the, um, the, the suspense side

of it is the stuff that happens along the way.

Like the guy with the radio, um, who's calling security,

the grandma that's walking

by yelling at you saying you can't do that here,

or whatever, that kind of stuff, right?

Mm-hmm. That's the kinda stuff that creates the suspense so

that you're, you wanna know what the heck's gonna

happen next, is that the idea? Right?

Because you're not gonna know that the end of that video,

he's making no baked cookies uhhuh in the aisle, you know?

But it's getting a wide enough audience.

Uh, we did this with a pie where I,

no one should watch me cook.

It's boring and horrible, and the outcome's rarely great,

But they're, they're not gonna be able to turn away,

obviously if you've done a video on this, right?

Yeah. But 14 plus million views on somebody watching me

make a pie, just

because I made it a little bit, I made it more interesting.

It was more interesting to watch.

And then we had tons of clickthroughs to the website

to actually get the recipe that no one would've ever cared

about my recipe before that, right?

But when you can drive, get that much attention,

you are going to find your audience,

especially if it's still somewhat in your

niche like cooking.

So the key to creating a suspense is

what, like, give us a couple tips.

It's, I mean, it's, it's always gonna come back

and hinge on emotion and not satisfying that curiosity gap.

If people can figure out the ending

or your beats throughout

suspense is just the middle of your video.

It's what beats are you crafting that are continuing

to point to that payoff that you, you inspired,

you created the itch in the hook.

Now how are you continuing to story tell

and sustain the suspense

before you're gonna pay it off in the last three seconds?

Because remember that, that is the golden rule.

Your first three seconds must create a niche

that you do not pay off until the very end of your video.

So your suspense is holding that, holding that attention,

continuing to raise the stakes

and make them care about the outcome even more.

So if you're making vegan content

and you're gonna do a scare tactic about red meat

with a really strong polarizing hookup top,

and then the second sentence says something like,

and 90% of you are eating it every single night,

don't tell them that the carcinogen is steak or whatever.

Like, don't tell them what the answer is.

You created a really big curiosity gap up top. Okay?

And then you're gonna say, dig the knife in on

that second sentence that applies to everybody.

And you're like, and nine outta 10

of you are doing this every single day.

Now, don't say it's stake

or don't say whatever the payoff of the information is.

Now you're in your third sentence through the rest

of the video, you're gonna keep doubling down on

why this is so important.

Some big stat, how, why are you credible?

How should, why should people listen to you

and continue to build the stakes

of why people care throughout it.

And you're just building the anxiety more

and more for them to hear what is the thing

that I should not be doing that I'm already doing?

And then give it to 'em whenever you're ready

to end the video, whether it's in 30

seconds or in 30 minutes.

Perfect. Okay? So, so far we know we got a hook

and we got suspense. What's next? Mm-hmm.

And suspense. The easiest way

to think about you doing great suspense is

by designing your video in reverse, beat

by beat, line by line.

Are you still interested? Have you given the payoff?

Are your stakes high enough?

Um, and we'll get to stakes in a minute

'cause they're a very important piece.

Uh, but the third part of this six step formula

is, is the payoff.

And this is just the end of your video, guys.

This is where you satisfy that curiosity gap.

And this is where you decide what you want,

want the audience to feel about you.

This is where the audience makes the decision

of if they're gonna follow you,

if they're gonna unfollow you,

if they're gonna drop a comment, if they're gonna share it

with a friend who could really

use this information right now.

And this is where they, this is the DTR,

the defining the relationship.

So you get to decide if you want this

to be a satisfying payoff

or an unsatisfying payoff to further elicit emotion.

Are you leading them into a part two?

Do you ask them to engage in the comments? So the payoff is,

Can you define what you mean by payoff?

Just so my audience understands what you mean by that,

The last three to 10 seconds of your video.

Yeah. But payoff means something more than just the last

three to five seconds of your video.

Does it not? Are you not like finishing the story?

Is that what you really mean by a payoff?

Are you not concluding the story?

Is that the, is that the concept here?

I would say for 90% plus pieces of content, you are com,

you're book ending it, you make

that promise in the beginning, and you're giving the resolve

at the end unless you're leading them into

follow for part two.

You know, and you're gonna keep this going as a mini series

where you're not fully completing it

and you're going to draw this out over eight micro videos.

Got it. Okay. So quick question.

I've seen videos that have

what I think is the payoff at the very front of the video

where they show something

and then they kind of show how they made it.

Um, and some of those go viral as well.

Do you suggest or not suggest that

This is where step six comes into play?

Ah, okay. If

You're gonna show a flash forward of it,

it, you don't want it.

You st you want it to be very strategic.

If you're gonna show the payoff upfront, there has

to be a curiosity gap in that flash forward.

Like if I show an invisible cabinet

that blends into the wall

and it's really cool novel looking.

Yeah, I've never seen anything like that before.

Now you're gonna back me in, in seconds four

and five to how that started.

Yeah. Or a tree that somebody painted

that looks like it's not there, you know what I mean?

Exactly. Or a hole in the ground

that looks like it's like a cavernous pit,

even though it's just a painting

on a sidewalk or something like that. Right?

Right. If you're gonna show the payoff naked girl running

down the road with a wedding dress falling off

or like, whatever it is, there has to be enough

of a curiosity gap in that payoff

to see how did we get there?

What happened in order?

And then you're backing into the story.

But if you're just giving away the end, um,

then you wouldn't wanna do that.

And with recipes and things like that, it,

it's worth testing if there is, if the payoff big enough

with a big enough curiosity gap,

like if your amazing looking brownies are just gorgeous,

that's a pretty, that's a pretty strong hook.

Yeah. Because you're like, holy crap,

I've never seen food that beautiful in my life.

How did you make those big, fluffy, gooey brownies? Got it.

And then get into the recipe,

which is gonna be more interesting than cracking an egg into

a bowl as your opening shot.

Okay. So what comes after, what's the fourth step?

So now that we've got our foundation,

we've got hook suspense payoff, why,

how are we gonna get people to actually engage?

Right? How are we gonna get people to three x the amount

of comments and how are we gonna

send this into the algorithm?

And a lot of people just kind of hope for the engagement

that they want, right?

They're like, oh, I hope people comment on this.

But we rarely leave anything up

to chance when we're designing content.

And so we will design our comment sections even in reverse.

So we've already talked about identifying that core emotion

that we want, and I am envisioning literally, Michael,

what I want people to be saying in the comment section,

and that I'm making sure my creative inspires

that commentary.

So if you're pinning two different ideologies together,

republicans of Democrats

or whatever, say something

that would inspire the biggest Democrat to comment.

Like, what are you saying that's pushing on their

sensibilities and inspiring them to feel something

that they did feel emotions

that they didn't even know they had, right?

As an entertainer, if we're making, showing how you can, uh,

steam salmon in a dishwasher

that's gonna make people have a comment about that,

you know, that's gross

or don't mess with your food or whatever.

Um, but we do design our comment sections in reverse.

An example of that actually would be the wine pie.

You wanna know the only reason that got 14 million views is

'cause my fly was undone and I knew it was undone.

No one should be walking watching me make pie.

The only reason I got 'em to make pie watch me do it was

because my fly was undone.

And every comment was about it.

Oh no, take this down your barn door's open.

Oh, poor girl doesn't know.

And so that was the comment section,

but that allowed it to go

as a cooking video into the stratosphere.

I never called attention to it.

I it was just subtly there

and enough people noticed that commented

who would've never normally commented.

So it got served to people

who would never normally see that video.

But because the algorithm knows it's in,

the cooking niche is gonna serve it

to more of those audiences.

Now do, again, do you have to be silly?

Do you have to do your undo your fly? Absolutely not.

Uh, but you do need to find something that's interesting.

You'll see people do this

with like misspelling common words.

You'll see it people wearing one earring,

put a paperclip in your beard.

Like part of this is a branding conversation.

Is your brand unique enough? What is your USP?

And how can you design a comment section, uh, that

how can you design a comment section that is going

to stand out and, and marry and,

and be in tandem with your brand?

But my main goal in this is just inspiring people

to think about it.

Like, think about why somebody would be compelled to comment

and what can you do in your video to elicit that response,

to get somebody to comment who normally never would.

Um, another sillier one that I think you

and I had talked about previously was

we used this one all the time

and it was, I'll just continue with the recipe example

for my cooks out there.

Um, but think about

how this could apply to your niche as well.

So we would be making some recipe, and this is

because we ran a lot of cooking channels,

but we would be making a recipe

and somebody would say, oh, hey will get the

ketchup outta the fridge for me.

Sure. So they turn around, they go to get the ketchup out

of the fridge, but we would place like tampons very

visible right there.

And we would not call attention to it,

but we, they'd be near the ketchup.

So when you grab the ketchup, you would see the tampons,

the entire section was, oh my gosh,

should we be refrigerating our tampons?

Should we be doing this? Should they be cold?

What's the reason for this? And we never, again,

never call attention to it.

It doesn't discredit the recipe,

the chef, anything like that.

It's just a little Easter egg to get people to comment.

And so it would, it would send it.

And then you always have some smart,

but in the comments being like,

of course you should refrigerate your tampons,

and they would just make stuff up

to be a know-it-all, you know, the internet.

Um, but it would start this whole thread.

Um, and so those are just little things

that we would do depending on the video and the content.

Just thinking before we ever shoot the video, how,

what are we gonna do in this video

to inspire people to comment?

And guys, even just by thinking about it a little bit more,

you're gonna come up with something

that's gonna three extra comment section.

We, we just see it all the time just

by putting a little bit of thought into it.

So what I'm hearing you say is the idea of, at least

with these examples you're giving to get people to

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YouTube Transcript:6-Step Formula to a Billion Views: Adley Kinsman Viral Video Secrets