1,000,000 views x 19mins (talk) = 13,194days / 1,884weeks/ 36years of watch time.
Start with spending 30 years online, participating in online communities, curating good stuff as a way of honing your taste and building a network of positivity.
Then spend 20 years and a lot of money / time attending other peoples events, learning what excellence looks like in terms of storytelling and delivery whilst also connecting folks you meet to others you know as a pro-social act of being a human.
Speak on five continents across a few subjects (from social media to creativity), to audiences large and small, and build up 15 years as a ‘professional’ in the topics discussed.
Contribute as a speaker in three other TEDx events and assimilate the lessons learned from those varied experiences.
Mix in a decade as licensee and producer of TEDx events for the capital city of New Zealand, and deliver as part of said events the speaker coaching, all as a volunteer.
And finally, add in about another decade of getting paid as a coach in the topic you’ll be speaking on, constantly sharpening your craft, building out services, delivering 1-2-1s and masterclasses and courses, so that you can then have a trove of experiences to reference.
Then just do a TEDx talk with six post-it notes as a script and a smile on your face.
Easy!
I am gratefully astonished.
One million views is the most popular thing I’ve ever done.
Building on the above, this was the other stuff I did to nudge things along:
OWNED
When the video went live in December 2022 I blogged about it and shared on via my social media channels. I kept tracking and blogging when it hit numeric milestones which included 100,000 (which included the announcement of a pre-order of my new book, see below) 250,000, 500,000 (which included a giveaway for the community also) and 750,000 views.
It inspired the book / audiobook, Speaking With Purpose: A guide to delivering impressive presentations!:
A whole bunch of strangers have bought it and the digital bundle has been shared with all my clients ever since as a freebie.
Obviously, it references back to the talk often and would definitely have aided awareness.
Did a whole bunch of LinkedIn postings over the past couple of years (and Twitter when I was still on there) using the following clipped pieces to activate interest. And a banner was added to the top of my website whereby visitors can quickly access the talk:
Six months before the talk came out I launched a ‘Presenting Engagingly Online’ course (which used my three-prong approach shared in the TEDx talk):
I updated the course with the TEDx video, referencing it a few times throughout the curriculum. After chalking up a healthy five-figure return which sustained me through the lean-years of post-Covid-times, decided not to develop this out further after asking and gaining feedback from the community.
Shared the talk as a resource to my speaker coaching clients who I know in turn have shared it with others in their network.
EARNED
I leveraged my direct TEDx experience in formulating a punchy title for the talk which would both ignite curiosity as well as be easily found in search terms. There’s also the talk description which again is key for being ‘findable’ along with ensuring a short bio. and most importantly, a clickable link back to my website.
For about half a year I responded to a few reddit communities regarding public speaking queries, offering advice and insights whilst adding in the link to my talk (being conscious not to just spam but to respond direct to the questions and adding in the talk as a further overview if relevant).
Got featured in some podcasts either as a direct result of my talk where the folks found me through or where others in my network thought it warranted exploration. This obviously helped introduce it to brand new communities I would never have gotten by myself:
The Subtle Art of Public Speaking | Stage, Page & Screen Podcast
Digby Scott, Dig Deeper Podcast | Translation, Narration, Curation and Host Leadership
Deconstructing My TEDx Talk | A Critique Via The GhostRanch Podcast
And then in November 2024 the talk got featured on ted.com (now available to be found through their esteemed platform and also ‘stumbled upon’:
PAID
Took out a couple of Google Ads early on and spent a couple hundred bucks on them. For some reason can’t get into my account online but seem to recall it created a few hundred click-throughs.
I also spent the same amount on Blaze over a six week campaign about a year ago, achieving about 144,000 impressions and approximately 400 click-throughs, which is a 0.27777777777778% rate of actual engagement.
As you can see, the growth has been a mix of building on a legacy of activity as a foundation, then leveraging ‘owned’ media channels, ‘earning’ access to other peoples networks through features and it being shared on, very little paid activity, plus organic growth through all the cross-posting which aids the web-rankings and search.
Hope all the above aids someone out there when it comes your turn to step on the red spot and wishing you all the best with it (hit me up if you need some coaching)!