Paul Warren

Paul’s been in the online marketing space for almost 19 years now so he knows what works.

He sold an 8 Figure eCommerce business that sold computer parts & accessories online to a listed company and has now taken those skills to help other small businesses.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Paul’s success

Using a video licensing strategy to help a brand go viral

Result if you follow the steps in Paul’s session

Drive traffic and engagement by leveraging other’s viral videos

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Do a search via, let’s just assume what just say you’re on a page about cats, cats doing crazy stuff, you know, you can again, say go to YouTube, find the most popular cat videos that you can find with millions of views, millions of comments, bah, bah, bah, reach out to those people and say, “Hey, I want to use your cat video”.

There’s a lot of people who use these strategies and don’t do this properly as well. So I’ll leave that up to you to whether you want to do things sneaky. And just take that video and put it on your Facebook page, right? So you can get penalized for doing that, though, cancel your account, I’d rather not do that. But once you’ve got it on there, you know, then you boost it to your audience.

So again, you putting a video that’s related to what, it’s connected to your page, obviously, you know, then you start producing it because you don’t want it to sit down and go viral by itself, you need to actually get it in front of people quickly. It’s all about, you know, the time at which you can actually get it in front of people.

So can I just jump back a few steps here? So how are you actually contacting or connecting with the person that owns the video, posted that original video?

Shoot them a message on, you know, YouTube, email, or whatever most of them are, why contact us, I’ll hate the videos these days. You go to YouTube and again, if you’d like to license, contact us at media at paul.com, you know? And you can work out a good deal with most people.

Okay, and are you, I mean, are you always paying them a lot? Can you as well just say, hey, like, love your video would love to share it with my audience?

Yes, I’ve done that before. Okay. We shared one video, and I didn’t ask permission before I did all this for an hour. And I thought we’ll go rogue that day. You know, I saw her on the bus. We shared it and it was funny. It was a four hour drive video and the guy in the video actually commented on the video, he’s like, “Hey guys, thanks for sharing my video”.

And then everybody just proceeded to go, “Hey, Cow”. I think his name was Cow. “Love your video man”. And I message him, said, “Hey, if you make more I want them. I’ll pay for them as well”.

So, and he was cool. He’s like, Oh my God, we didn’t, we’ve had 250,000 views and 600 comments about me basically getting my car bombed. So, he was cool with that. Customer loved that, everybody loved that. That’s chicken on the boxes. You know?

And when you say, Okay, I’m willing to pay for it. How do you know? Like, if you’re doing this for the first time, how do you identify, well, how much should I be patiently asking, can I repost it for free? Should I be offering to pay for it? What’s the right approach?

Well, I you know, it’s obviously, if one could even get it for free, it’s always going to be the way to go, you know. Hey, we want to share your video with our audience. If you want to brand it, feel free. That’s cool. You know, we’re totally cool with that. We’ll do it for nothing. And then if they go well, I think you can pay for it because a lot of these guys monetize their videos by YouTube.

So, if you’ve got, let’s just say getting 10 million views on YouTube a month or something, I think he gets like $500,000 every month from YouTube by monetizing those videos. So you can give them a flat fee. Here’s a couple hundred bucks, we want to use your video, you know, and most guys are gonna be pretty cool with that as well.

Again, like a lot of the stuff that we used to do as well like at Wacom was, it’s all original content, so I’m not paying anyone for that, you know, so and talking about other things that go viral, you know, like, if you see why we can share content on a post and it still links back to YouTube that links back to wherever, it’s not actually an embedded video on Facebook itself.

So it’s a bit of a different strategy. So people are leaving, they are going somewhere else as well so that you know there’s a few different ways you can use it.

Yeah, that probably leads into my next question quite well. So when you do say license it from that person, is it okay just to get a yes and an email or you are you doing like form of practice?

Keep it simple. Yeah, I just, you know, here’s what we agree, here’s how much we’re gonna pay for you, pay for the video, we’re free to use it only here, we’re not going to go make a commercial out of it, obviously, you know, it’s going to go on Facebook page, that’s it. And, you know, off we go. It’s pretty straightforward.

Keeping it simple. I like it even into contracts. So you’ve got the license for the video or you’ve got them to agree for you to share it on your Facebook page. Are you getting the original video and then embedding it onto Facebook?

Yes, yep, just put it straight. Just upload the video straight to Facebook with an appropriate title name. I mean, most people don’t probably give that too much thought but I do, just coming from an SEO background. So I’ll call it for driving favours, blah blah blah.

So I think that video will also rank organically on Facebook as well as we begin, as people move more to Facebook for you know searching as well. So I’m I sort of going down a bit of a track here. But I would expect Facebook to really take a big market share away from YouTube over the next couple years.

So don’t be surprised in another two to three years, everyone’s actually sharing their video to Facebook instead of YouTube. So that will make what we’re doing now even easier again.

So, and obviously, the original poster is providing you the content, you putting it on your wall, you’re boosting the hell out of it, you’re benefiting from it, so they say you won’t ever need to do these deals, I think in the future.