Replicate PSY Gangnam Style Success
If you’ve never heard of PSY Gangnam Style video before do you even browse the web?
On a serious note, Gangnam Style is one of the most viewed Youtube videos of all time with a view count of 3,738,581,583.
Pretty impressive considering only around 7.8 Billion humans are living in the world(according to WorldoMeters) that’s not a bad view count.
Despite PSY Gangnam Style view count and why “officialpsy” created this song, we can all be confident of one thing; Gangnam Style has generated a shocking amount of money from:
- Youtube ad revenue (preroll adverts before the video starts)
- Merchandise
- and, using Gangnam as a traffic generator to other videos where the process repeats.
No matter how annoying we may all think of Gangnam Style song, you cannot deny they did something seriously right.
In this PSY Gangnam Style article I’m going to reveal 3 Tips To Replicate Gangnam Styles success, and they aren’t actually that hard.
But first here is how much money PSY made in the first two weeks of launching the video back in 2012.
According to Forbes PSY Gangnam Style made approx $8 Million – $10 Million.
Not bad right?
Now it’s estimated to be 5-6X the amount eight years later after creation across the massive success.
With that being said, how can you replicate a fraction of this success?
The answer is pretty simple so keep on reading.
TIP 1: Gangnam Style Youtube Thumbnail
When it comes to ranking your Youtube videos at number one position, almost any marketing guru will tell you that having a great Youtube thumbnail is vital.
The Perfect Youtube Thumbnail
Marketers say the perfect youtube thumbnail has two clear things:
- It evokes an emotion within a viewer
- It creates curiosity to encourage a click
Let’s have a closer look at PSY Gangnam’s style thumbnail.
You can see the youtube thumbnail has a meme like figure in a weird stance.
“Why is he standing like that?” “whats going on?“
this creates curiosity, but I wouldn’t say it creates a strong emotional response, however, see the thing to the left of Gangnam?
The horse.
Is the horse smiling?
Is the horse grinning?
Is the horse sniggering?
Analysing it as I type is making me a little unsettled, this is the emotional response I was talking about.
Another weird curiosity is why is a meme like fellow wearing sunglasses and dancing in the middle of a room with a bunch of goofy and sniggering like horses.
The whole thing simply does not make sense to anyone seeing this image for the first time, yet, it’s so odd that it forces you to click on the image.
So many people think it’s difficult to create thumbnails for you, BUT these are templated.
There is software like this one which has tons of highly engaging and curiosity peaking designs ready for use. You don’t need to worry about the design or anything like that, it’s just a simple click, and you’re done.
If you’re someone who has been trying to crack the youtube thumbnail’s to increase views and subscribers click here to check it out.
TIP 2: Gangnam Style Video Tags
If you have never heard of Youtube Video Tags and you’ve been trying to get more youtube views, subscribers, and sales you’re missing out on a gold mine.
For those of you who don’t know or not sure why youtube video tags are essential;
Video tags are like little messages you place in the “Youtube Video Tag” section telling Youtube what your video is about and kind of like what categories it should go in when people search for specific things.
Youtube Video Tags are not as important as they were back in the day, BUT they are still relevant.
When PSY Gangnam Style first uploaded back in 2012 video tags was a significant ranking factor, and you can see some of the tags Gangnam Style tried to rank for were “Korean Singer”, “Korean Wave”, “KPOP” and a few others.
Looking at statistics from 2008, I can see the search phrase “Korean Singer” was averaging over 38,000 searches every month which is a tremendous amount of search traffic.
BUT 4 years later you see a massive spike nearly doubling that to 66,000 searches per month – that’s just for that one search phrase.
PSY Gangnam Style saw the potential of this likely low competitive but very high searched keyword and wanted to get their music video in front of all those people searching.
I won’t analyse all the other video tags PSY Gangnam Style took advantage of because I think you get the point.
Each one of the video tags was researched and bringing in 30,000+ views each month.
Ten of these keywords were potentially bringing in 300,000 searches per month.
Crazy right?
It is but want to no something crazier?
It’s not hard to do at all.
Most people spend weeks using a free keyword tool called “Google Keyword Planner” to find all these youtube video tags with low competition but massive search volume, but I don’t use that tool anymore.
I use a tool called VMBP as this little tool quickly finds hundreds of low competition but massive search volume keywords I can use for my tags.
It’s actually on discount as of the creation of this article – it’s usually $97, but by clicking this link you will get it for $27 which is a bargain considering how much time it’s going to save you and how much potential earnings you will make if you use it correctly.
I think the discount ends in the next few days.
TIP 3: Gangnam Style Youtube Video Title
At first glance, I was a little shocked to see how simple the title of PSY Gangnam Style video is.
Then I realised what they did.
Perfect Youtube Video Title
Youtube SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Experts say Youtube titles are are the number one ranking factor to getting a Youtube video to number one on Youtube.
However, if your title is not targetting your keyword with search volume, then the whole idea simply does not work.
An example of this is: “How To Get More Youtube Views.“
You can see this search phrase gets around 1600 searches every month.
When I’m optimising my perfect Youtube video I would include the title “How to get more youtube views” and boom, I now have a chance of claiming some of that 1600 searches per month.
As you can tell by PSY Gangnam Style, they have only targetted the name of the song, In both English and Korean.
So, where did this search traffic come from?
Back in 2012, Youtube ranked videos a little different from how they do it in 2020.
Thankfully there is a website called Wayback Machine which allows you to see every version of almost every ranking website, video, and image to ever have been on the web.
So I entered Gangnam Style video into the site and bang I saw the video was continually changing youtube video tags, updating youtube description .
One of the issues of doing what they were doing “keyword stuffing” is now Youtube is much smarter and will penalise videos that do the same tactic.
Keyword stuffing is adding lots of keywords you want to rank for in your description, URLs, hashtags, video tags; basically, anywhere you can add keywords.
By adding hundreds of these keywords would have told Youtube “my video is all about keyword, keyword, keyword” basically abusing the system to get all the different search traffic.
Don’t do this, you will get penalised and may have to start your youtube channel from scratch.
What to do now?
Well, you need a delicate balance between keyword stuffing and keyword optimising.
All you would do to get around this Youtube ranking change is to sprinkle your keywords into fairly well-articulated paragraphs and place them into your description and make your title include your core keyword.
Example Youtube Title: “5 Best Ways To Get More Youtube Views”
Personally, I’m a little lazy when it comes to being creative with my Youtube SEO which is why I let Video Marketing Blaster generate all of that for me in 2 clicks.
It does it better than me anyway.