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I almost didn’t write this answer.Because I wanted to keep the magic behind my viral video to myself. Because of my ego. Because I would have loved to brag that I just sat back and it took off on its own. But that’s not what happened.I did a ton of marketing, and it started long before the video was released. Going viral was not an accident — it was work.I tried a lot of things. This is what worked for me.1. Don’t be “too good” for marketingI almost didn’t put together a marketing plan. Because what if I did all this marketing, and then the video still flopped? That would’ve been embarrassing. Then I realized how stupid that was.It’s better to try your damnedest and fail than to hold back and always wonder what if.If you put all this effort into your video, why would you rely on luck for the last leg? Swallow your pride. Give your work a fighting chance. Put together a marketing plan. This article will show you how.2. Understand how things go viral on the internetYou see videos on YouTube with millions of views and you wonder — where did they all come from?Here’s how my video, Girl Learns to Dance in a Year went viral:Views per day on Girl Learns to Dance in a YearDay One: 80k viewsFirst, I posted to Facebook/Twitter, and submitted it to social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News. I personally asked many of my friends to share it. I tweeted it at well-known dancers. I emailed bloggers who had covered other viral dance videos.Of all the things I tried, Reddit paid off. It got to the top of the GetMotivated subreddit. I did this by following the advice in this article.Day Two: 800k viewsBloggers who had seen it on Reddit the day before started publishing articles about it. First Kottke. Then blogs like Mashable, Jezebel, and Huffington Post.Blogs drove a ton of traffic. Each blog is a giant marketing engine with millions of readers and twitter followers. It’s in their interest to get the article as many views as possible, because each view is an ad they can serve up. Understand how the money flows. It’s all about clicks and advertising dollars.Day Three: 1.8 million viewsIt made the YouTube frontpage. I’m not sure how it got there, but I suspect the blogs were sending it so much traffic that YouTube’s algorithms picked up on it.Try many things. You only need one of them to pay off in order for your video to go viral. For me, that thing was Reddit. Your thing might be different. Your goal is to get major blogs to write you up, because their marketing power is ridiculous.3. Release on Monday or TuesdayPeople watch YouTube videos when they’re at work. They read the news at work. Release your video on Monday or Tuesday to give it the whole week to gain momentum. Weekends are speed bumps.I chose Tuesday because people are busy catching up with email on Monday. I got lucky with the timing because there wasn’t any major breaking news that day. Releasing on a slow news day will help you.Mind your holidays, too. Don’t release when people are not at the office.4. Figure out who has a stake in your videoIf your video takes off, who are all the people and companies who might want a piece of the action? These people can help market you.My YouTube description was full of links to possible sponsors — to the Lululemon and American Apparel clothes I was wearing. To the Lift app I used to track my dancing. To the BART train station I danced at. To the music I danced to. They’re all things I genuinely believe in, so I was happy to send traffic their way.I contacted all these companies and asked them to share the video. Some of them shared, some of them didn’t. Try them all.5. None of this matters if your video isn’t goodYou can get your friends to share. But only the strength of the content can get their friends to share. If you are serious about making good content, read Made to Stick.Why will people share your video? People share things when they feel emotion. What emotion will your viewers feel?Some emotions spread better than others. Emotions that spread: awe, excitement, amusement, anger, anxiety. Emotions that don’t: contentment, sadness.6. Tell a storyI’m a decent dancer for a year of practice but I’m nothing compared to the pros. There are thousands of dancers way more talented whose videos didn’t go viral.Girl Learns to Dance in a Year went viral because it wasn’t just another dance video with cool moves and cool camera angles. It wasn’t about how good the dancing was. It was about how awkward I was when I started, and how I got better with practice.And it’s not just a story about dancing. It’s about having a dream and not knowing how to get there — but starting anyway.People want stories. That’s what all TV, movies, and books are. Tell a story.7. Make your video shorterThe first thing people do when they play a video is check to see how long it is. It helps them decide whether to watch it. 10 minutes: forget it. 2 minutes: I’ll give it a shot. 30 seconds: Heck, might as well.Make your video as short as possible while still keeping the heart of the story. The editor and I literally spent hours shaving off seconds to get the video down to 1 minute 51 seconds.Short videos spread better.8. Write a viral titleHere’s a quick test. How would you finish this sentence:“Hey did you see the video of __________”Fill in the blank. That’s your title.Here’s a bad title: My Journey of Dance, a Year of MovementBetter: I Learned to Dance in a YearEven better: Girl Learns to Dance in a YearBest: Girl Learns to Dance in a Year (TIME LAPSE)9. Know what you’re willing to compromiseWhat are you willing to do for views? Are you willing to compromise on your beliefs? If so, which ones?I made a compromise. I believe that grown women should not be referred to as girls. Then I named the video Girl Learns to Dance in a Year. It rolls off the tongue better than Woman Learns to Dance in a Year. I had decided I could live with that compromise.I almost named the video Asian Girl Learns to Dance in a Year. I’m really glad I didn’t do that.You have to decide what you can live with and what you can’t. Figure this out before you release because once you hit publish, you can’t take it back.10. What to do once you go viralPeople will criticize your work. This is good because it gets them talking. There are lots of comments about how I’m a terrible dancer, or how I got worse on Day 365. People left racist and sexist comments. They even debated the definition of time lapse. Try not to let all this get to you. Controversy is good.Viral videos have a short shelf life. You have 15 minutes of fame, and your job is to open as many doors as possible in those 15 minutes. Create as many opportunities as you can. Ironically, the week I released the video, I barely danced at all. I didn’t go out and celebrate. I went home and responded to as many emails and tweets as I could.Make sure the media can get a hold of you, and it’s not hard to find your email address. Media interview requests will start coming in. Accept them. National TV may contact you. Feed the media beast.Know where you want to direct your traffic. I linked to my blog, website, and Twitter from the video. They were all ready to go. One thing I messed up was I didn’t have an email signup form ready on the Dance In A Year website. I’ve fixed that now, lesson learned. Be prepared.Why I did itI wanted people to see the video because it represents what I believe in.When you watch a professional perform, you’re seeing them at their moment of glory. It’s intimidating because you don’t see how you could ever get to where they are. You don’t see the moment they started, when they were a beginner just like you. I wanted people to see the beginning.The best response to the video has been all the people who reached out to me, newly inspired to learn. Learn dance. Learn guitar, Korean, beatboxing, drawing, parkour. That brings me a lot more fulfillment than the video view count numbers.After hearing from so many people, I’m now working on a site to make it easy for anyone to make their own learn in a year projects. I’m really excited to see other people level themselves up in all sorts of skills.None of this might have happened if I had decided to sit back and just hope it went viral.This answer was originally posted on Fast Company: Dancing YouTube Sensation Karen Cheng's 10 Tips For Making Your Video Go ViralThanks to Cedric Dahl, Alex Debelov, Nikolay Valtchanov, Lynn Tao, and Orion Hombrebueno for marketing help and advice for the video.Further reading: Adam Mordecai's answer to What advice does Upworthy have for making viral videos? Do new employees get a checklist or something?

Question: “How was it possible that a family could be supported comfortably on a single income in, for example, the 1950s, yet today people struggle with two incomes?”OK. having actually lived in the 1950s and disagreeing with many of the posted answers I will have to answer this, giving real and verifiable examples. In particular, I must respond to an extremely inaccurate and misleading answer posted by Quora writer Heather Johnson.To put things in perspective, I grew up in southeastern and south central Wisconsin. My father was an engineer, i.e., he had a modest middle class income. My mother, although she had worked before marriage, was a housewife and parent without outside income. The family consisted of my parents and six children, all of whom went to college. Everything about our lives was normal mid-western, middle class.Johnson writes: “[A]ppliances were bought on 5yr hire purchase plans. Once you paid it off you kept it for 20 yrs”. NO. Just no!My parents paid cash for every appliance purchase, as did most people in the middle class. Credit cards, other than American Express and Diner’s Club, both for business use, did not exist. Consumer credit did not exist, other than time payments from Sears if you bought their Kenmore brand and small loans at bad terms from Household Finance stores which catered to the improvident. Sensible people never borrowed money. Other than gas cards, there were no non-business credit cards in the 1950s and ‘60s. No one had ever heard the term “Master Card” or the phrase “Minimum Monthly Payment”.Appliances, although well made and, unlike today, designed so that they could be serviced, seldom lasted for “20 years”. A heavily used automatic washing machine or dryer might last 5 to 7 years. A kitchen range might be kept for 10 years, after which maintenance issues involving heating elements, clocks, timers, and switches made replacement likely. Automatic dishwashers and garbage disposers and garage door openers all had limited life spans. Tube type televisions in the 1950s ran hot, needed frequent service, and lasted no more than 5 years before needing to be replaced.Johnson writes: “Houses were small…a kitchen resembling a walk-in closet.”NO. This is the house my family lived in in the 1950s.It had a very large kitchen, a separate formal dining room, a living room with masonry fireplace, 3 large bedrooms all with closets, a closed in porch, solid oak floors throughout, a full basement, a cedar shingle roof, and a separate garage, all on a large wooded lot on a quiet street. The quality throughout was far higher than that which one can buy today. There were two Bell System dial telephones, one in a telephone alcove in the dining room and one in my parent’s bedroom.It was a typical middle class home.In 1962 my father had this built.It had a large kitchen, with a dish washer (!), formal dining room, living room, two masonry fireplaces, family room, office, laundry room, four large bedrooms, 2 and ½ baths, hardwood floors, full finished basement (with a bar and a pool table), two car attached garage, patio, breezeway, all on a two acre wooded lot with a view. Again there were two dial telephones, one of which was in my parent’s bedroom. This was a very typical home for a middle class salaried employee. In the 1950s American middle class families did not live in tiny shacks.Johnson claims that Americans in the 1950s: “[B]ought one car and maintained it for decades.” NO! Cars did not last for “decades”.In the 1950s a car was considered old at 60,000 miles when it was traded in on a new model. It was unheard of to own a car whose odometer had turned over from 99,999 to 0. The odometers did not even have a 100,000 mile dial. Most people traded in their cars every 3 to at most 5 years. Many car guys had arrangements with their car dealer wherein they would trade in their car every 2 years for a new version of the same make and model for a fixed amount of money. These are some of the cars my father owned in the 1950s. Note the upward mobility shown by the car models over the years.And from 1958 on, like many middle class American families, we had two cars, one for my father and the other shared by my mother and the children. They always paid cash for their cars, regarding auto loans as wasteful.This was my mother’s car.Johnson writes: “You had a modest closet consisting of one Sunday best outfit, 2 work outfits and 2 casual outfits.NO! My father wore suits to work and casual slacks and golf shirts on the golf course. I never saw him in a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. My mother dressed nicely, owned a few outfits by Dior and Balenciaga and Chanel and had a seldom worn mink stole. Although she knew how to dress well, this was not unusual or extravagant for the wife of a salaried engineer. In the 1950s and ’60s one dressed up to go shopping downtown or out to dinner or take an airline flight.Johnson claimed: “You ate out infrequently”.Not exactly. Fast food joints did not exist. Nor did family casual restaurants, aside from Italian pizzerias or the Friday fish fry at the neighborhood bar. Families seldom went out to dinner with the children. But my father frequently took my mother out on Friday nights to a nice supper club with dancing afterwards.My family in the 1950s lived this way while my parents, after having struggled through the depression and war years, paid off a mortgage, paid for parochial school for the children, sent six children to college, had no debt, and invested enough money in the stock market to be well off in retirement. Unlike what Johnson implies, the American middle class in the 1950s did not live in some sort of austere deprived poverty.OK, how was that possible? The economic system of the post-war period was different.Unlike today where all of the gains in productivity in the economy are directed to the 1%, from 1945 to 1980 productivity gains were shared and enjoyed by all segments of the working classes.Employment was secure. If you were employed and did your job well you did not have to worry that you would lose your job to a KKR or Bain Capital leveraged buyout scheme or some balance sheet manipulator’s desire to create paper “share holder value” or enhance his own stock options. The term “down sizing” had not been thought of. Looting of pension funds, a standard tactic of leveraged buyouts today, would have been a criminal offense in the 1950s and 1960s..The forty hour week was the norm. Workers were not expected to either work when they were not being paid or take work home. Blue collar workers got overtime for anything beyond 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week. And that overtime was enough to allow my wife’s machinist father to pay off the mortgage of a new house in five years.Medical costs were reasonable. Hospitals were run by religious orders or owned by municipalities, not predatory corporations. The cost of having a baby, including days recovering in a pleasant sun lit room, was ~$250.Companies paid good wages and salaries and all good companies included medical insurance and defined benefit pensions.Employment included paid vacation time.Unions insured safe working conditions and good wages for working men. In the 1950s more than 30% of the jobs were unionized. (Today that figure is 11%, and most of those are public employees, i.e., cops and teachers.) Those union wages set a floor that kept up the wages of non-union workers and white collar employees.Union Pensions allowed comfortable retirements. I will describe for example the work and retirement history of a friend with whom we discussed work in the 1960s yesterday: Went to work in the late 1960s immediately after high school for an automobile manufacturer. Worked as a sweeper, i.e., a janitor. Retired after 30 years, and not yet 50 years old, on generous full pension. Pension includes excellent medial coverage from Kaiser-Permanente. Has been retired for 20 years. Owns, for personal use, a home in Florida and a condominium in Colorado, and farm land in Wisconsin. Travels.The public schools were good and staffed with good teachers. The courses included typing and secretarial skills and mechanical trades as well as academics. Thus, students graduated prepared either for college or for a trade.The cost of higher education was reasonable and a college education was easily affordable, especially at one of the excellent land grant universities, by anyone in the middle class or skilled blue collar class who qualified.Savings and Loan Associations and the post-war GI Bill offered affordable home mortgages while not lending either to speculators or those who were trying to live beyond their means, thus adding to both the growth and stability of home ownership. For a fixed rate 20 year mortgage the interest rate was ~4.5% in the 1950s and ~5.5% in the 1960s.Public transportation was better and far more extensive than today, offering an alternative to private cars.Work was closer to home seriously reducing commuting time and expenses for those who chose to drive to work.Americans who were adults in the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression. That taught those who were intelligent the value of savings and the danger of debt. Thus, they avoided consumer loans, paid cash for appliances and cars, put a large down payment on their homes, paid off mortgages quickly, lived within their means, and saved and/or invested.Finally, one must not forget that in the 1950s, because much of Europe had not yet recovered from the devastation of the war, American industry was given an extremely profitable decade and the American dollar was substantially overvalued making imports of goods to the United States, or travel by Americans to Europe, extremely inexpensive.The 1950s and 1960s were different. The American middle class in those decades did not live simple austere pleasureless lives. Nor did they lack nice things. But the difference was caused: 1) by a “Depression Mentality” which taught those who experienced the depression to avoid the debt trap, and 2) by structural differences in government regulations, differences in the tax system and who it was designed to serve, differences in business ethics, and differences in the economy. The different type of government in the 1950s and ’60s and different economy in that era allowed middle class families in the 1950s and 1960s to live nicely on one earner’s salary.As Quora writer Denis O’Sullivan said in the comments (see below): “ The old tradition of the poor getting poorer returned in the 1980′s. It was a good run from 1940 to about 1980 for both blue and white collar employees.”Note re wages and prices in the 1950s: In 1957 the Federal Minimum Wage was $1.00 per hour. Adjusted simply for inflation that would be $9.20 today. The Georgia State Minimum Wage today is $5.15…half of what adjusted for inflation the Federal Minimum Wage was in 1957. The median income for an engineer with 10 years experience in 1957 was $10,000. Beginning pharmacists earned $125 per week or $6,500 per year. In 1955 the median income of a physician in general practice was $15,000. In 1957 a classroom teacher in a city of 50,000 earned $4,500 per year. The hourly wage for an automobile assembly line worker worker was $2.27 per hour, for a tool and die worker $2.95 per hour or $118 for a 40 hour week. The price for the 1950 Ford Deluxe V8 shown in the above photos was ~ $1,100. The 1953 Nash Ambassador sold for $3,100, the 1958 Oldsmobile $4,200. The two story colonial house shown in the photos sold for $17,500 in 1957. It was originally built in 1937. The 1962 house with attached garage was built for $34,000. In 1950 an Admiral black and white console television with radio and phonograph cost $500. In 1954 a top-of-the-line Admiral Dual-Temp two door refrigerator-freezer cost ~$500.Note re union wages in the 1950s: In unionized plants workers were paid time and one-half for hours worked over 40 hours per week and double time for working on holidays. Overtime was available based on seniority. My wife’s father was a skilled machinist at an automobile plant. Having started his employment there as a young man before enlisting in WWII, he was one of the 6 most senior employees in a factory of thousands of workers. He, thus, could bid for and get well paid overtime work whenever he wanted. One year he worked every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and Holidays for at least 8 hours per day, taking off only for one day, Christmas. By doing so he paid off the mortgage on a new home in five years. The UAW Pension allowed one to retire after 30 years regardless of age at full pension. That pension included full medical coverage including eyeglasses and dental care.Note re charge plates: The embossed aluminum charge pates issued by some department stores,gasoline station charge plates, Diners’ Club cards, and American Express cards used in the 1950s and ’60s were not credit cards as we use the terms today. These cards had to be paid off in full monthly. Diners’ Club and American Express cards, which were printed on paper with typed in names and addresses, were for business, not personal, use and were only available to the trustworthy and wealthy.Note that the above card from 1955 is described as a CREDIT IDENTIFICATION CARD. It was a card that informed the merchant that the holder’s income and reputation for paying his bills had been verified. Merchants and restaurants who accepted charge card placed the sticker(s) for the card(s) they accepted on the entry door. But you could not trust that. Restaurant owners would terminate their contract with the credit card issuer without removing those stickers.Department store plates could only be used at one store or one association of stores. They were often limited to a relatively small amount, often $50 or less. These were in use into the 1970s. Gas station cards, of course, could only be used at named gas stations. Sears did offer a “Revolving Credit Account” to holders of its charge cards. But these, again, could only be used for purchases at Sears stores. The Sears Roebuck and Co. card eventually became the Discover Card. The first actual Credit Card was the Master Card. (known as Interbank from 1966–1969 and Master Charge from 1969–1979). The first Interbank Cards were issued in 1958 to a restricted group. Charge Cards were not widely distributed until well into the 1970s. And even in the ’70s one had to check with restaurant servers before ordering to determine if your card or any card was valid at that restaurant. Many businesses refused to accept charge card purchases below a set amount.As late as the 1970s women desiring a Department Store Charge Plate had to get it in their husband’s name and the application needed his approval and signature, regardless of the wife’s employment or income. My wife encountered this when she applied for an account at Charles A. Stevens, a woman’s fine clothing store in the Chicago Loop, and was told she needed my approval and signature although she had a better job and higher salary than I did!Note re Changes in Relative Costs: In the 1960s my best friend’s father was a factory worker at the big dirty, but unionized, Fairbanks-Morse plant. My blue collar family friend could afford to take flying lessons and, before he was allowed to drive a car, had a private pilot’s license and enough flying hours by the time we were in high school to have both an instrument rating and a dual engine rating.As teenagers we were allowed and could afford to rent and fly aircraft, usually a Cessna, over Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, sometimes taking our dates out for night flights. We were high school students, and we paid for those flights with our own earnings from part time or summer jobs. Today flying lessons and airplane rentals are only available to the rich.Life was very different in the 1950s and 1960s.

Well,you see…BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….Oh my god,I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe….HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*Dies*Well,let’s see.People of Slavic background were used as slaves thousands of years ago.Does that mean that I should get reparations from the current European governments?My great grandfather served in the First World War before being imprisoned and dying in a labor camp when Stalin came to power.Does that mean I should get reparations from the current Russian government?My grandparents lived during the Second World War, one of them was caught up in the Siege of Leningrad.Does that mean I should get reparations from Finland and the current German government?Everyone in my family was born in the Soviet Union and its laws and lived there until it collapsed in 1991. Some of them are alive to this day.Does that mean that I/they should get reparations for [Insert some bullshit pretext about oppression and lasting effects here] from the current government?One of my ancestors got a visit from some individuals.Does that mean that I should get reparations from the current government?FUCK.NO.What is done is done. You cannot fix the past. I personally was not affected by any of these things, therefore I should not get any reparations for anything. Some people from my family lived during the times of the Soviet Union and are alive to this day. They should not get a single kopeika from the government of Russia. None, nada,zilch, cero, nol’. The past is past, the hard times have come to an end, and we can do nothing but move on. The perpetrators of these acts are all dead or faded to obscurity.The ones that are alive don’t owe anything to anyone if the things that they did were legal at the time that they did them. It would be unconstitutional to retroactively punish someone for a law that didn’t exist yet. If they weren’t legal, then they SHOULD be punished.This whole reparations bullshit will only stagnate progress and won’t accomplish anything.Now,replace all mentions of anything relating to the Soviet Union, Russia, and the World Wars with things relating to the U.S. government, the Civil War,and Jim Crow as appropriate, the argument remains the same.Yes,injustices happened. Yes, some of those people may still be alive (From the Jim Crow Era, for those that want reparations for that). No, reparations or any such bullshit should not happen, because those particular wrongs have been righted. In fact,I would say that all due reparations (If any are due) have been paid in the form of the empowerment of those that have been wronged and those that did the wrong having lost at least some of their power.The ones calling for reparations today seem to be either be Social Justice ™ Warriors or those that are unsuccessful in life but can’t find anything to blame for their lack of success; so they decide to blame something that happened long ago and demand handouts, thinking that their problems will be solved.Oh, and I also oppose any alternative forms of reparation, such as free college tuition or any such nonsense, in case it wasn’t clear.So no, the descendants of slaves should not get any reparations.