Four tips to make an impact with topical videos

Whether it’s Earth Hour, the World Cup, going back to school, or presidential elections - leveraging the excitement around events can help to grow your channel. But it's not as simple as you'd think to create a really great topical video. Here are four tips—from starting your research to optimizing for—to get you started.

1. Make it timely

Bad Lip Reading is always at the forefront of trending topics and breaking news. To most effectively capture search traffic they upload their topical content as close to events as possible.

2. Plan ahead

One of Bethany Mota’s strategies is to program seasonally around big events that are relevant to her audience. Last year her 5 back-to-school videos gained over 14.3 million views combined.



3. Make trending topics suit you

Make-up artist and body-paint guru Alexys Fleming cleverly captures viewers searching for trending topics that aren’t usually associated with beauty, such as the Super Bowl and movie releases. But she makes sure that the content is relevant to her loyal viewers by still focusing on special effects make-up.



4. Use playlists to repackage content

Laura Vitale combines old and new content in playlists for her most important events of the year. By doing so, she creates new ways for her freshest videos to be discovered, but also makes it easy to watch her back-catalogue to viewers who may be seeing them for the first time.