How to Make a Music Video That Goes Viral on YouTube, and that costs next to nothing to make.

You know the feeling when you hear about some guy recording a song in his basement, throwing in a weird video and getting a trillion hits in a week on YouTube. You're thinking, "I'm killing myself to write great stuff and sell 10 CDs on CDBaby, and this hermit hits it big overnight!" What caused the hermits music video to go crazy viral like that, mass hysteria? Food poisoning? Big Brother? Here are some ideas for you to be the hermit!

To make a music video that goes viral on YouTube, gets tons of hits and makes you an Internet sensation overnight, you need to have four basic things. First you need to have an incredible song. Then you need to have incredible video or images. Thirdly, you need recording equipment and video software. And then you need to have enough influential friends to get it going. What you don't need is a lot of money. Here's how to get started on your YouTube Viral Video.

What Songs Go YouTube Viral?

Which songs have the best chance of hitting it big? Are there common threads that can help me write a winner? Sure are. Three types of songs have the best shot of being popular.

1. A song that is so amazingly good that it goes Youtube viral video on its own merits.

2. A song that is very unusual, either humorous or bizarre, in such a way that people have to see it to believe it.

3. A song that is piggybacking on something major happening in the world or in music. Let me expand on each of these three.

How do you write the amazingly good song?

Well, there ain't no way I can teach that in a paragraph or in an entire book. Every songwriter in the world struggles with that. If I would have one rule to follow it would be this: write a song that causes you to have an emotional reaction. Don't just focus on a clever hook or fancy lyric, focus on how you react emotionally to what is coming out. If it moves you, it will move others too. That's a good thing, a very good thing.

How do you write the unusual song?

For this there are even fewer rules, but I can make a very powerful suggestion here too. Go farther than you think is far. What do I mean? The art of comedy is the art of exaggeration. It's taking things that are a little bit unusual, and making them exceedingly unusual. There is a fierce little editor in our brains telling us not to go too far. Tell him to shut up. If you're going to be funny, that's not enough. If you're going to be bizarre, have people wondering if you should be allowed to wander the streets.

How to write the piggybacking song?

Well, a friend I know wrote a song about the uprisings in Egypt, and she immediately got thousands of hits. Writing a song about a famous person, something that's in the news, anything that people are paying attention to will gain you more exposure. Remember, on YouTube people search for keywords. Your song has as much a chance of coming up as anything else. Make sure whatever you do is legal, without stealing someone's copyright. Otherwise, you could get banned. OK, so that's the song part of YouTube Viral Video making.

Next: How to Add Video to the Song