Kickstarting TikTok: 55,500 Followers & 7m views in 6 Weeks

How Long Until I Go Viral?

Depends on how good your videos are. I posted my first video of this experiment on 12/16, and the first video that did really well was on 12/23. So it took me a week.

That said, I see many others on TikTok posting for months and never having a video do well.

In almost every case, my guess for why they aren’t succeeding is... See more

Testing and Iterating

After the first two weeks of posting twice per day, I had a pretty strong idea of what would do well and what would not. I would throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks first, and then focus in on what style you know is resonating with your audience.

Once you’ve figured that out, you can slow down to one video ev... See more

Publishing, Descriptions, & Hashtags

Once I’m done editing the videos on my laptop, I’ll send them to my phone and turn them into drafts within TikTok.

The only changes I make within the TikTok editor is to add captions so people can read what I’m saying (I suspect many people watch TikTok on silent, so captions help), and I add a text hook to ... See more

The most important part of editing is getting your video as tight as possible. Attention spans are short on TikTok, so you have to be willing to cut the video to make it as good and concise as possible. And make sure the first 2-3 seconds immediately hooks people. That’s how long you get before they scroll to the next video.

I find editing easiest if I just record one long video for each topic, including the pauses and mistakes, and then chop it up later.

Scripting

If scripts will help you, do your scripting the day before recording. I usually script out my videos using high-level bullet points that I want to hit on, then let it flow a little more naturally for actual ... See more

Filming & Cadence

Alright, let’s make some videos.

First, I think you should aim for two or more videos per day for the first few weeks until you get some hits . That might sound insane, but, it’ll give you a lot of data very quickly on what’s working and what isn’t, and you can slow it down to one video per day once you have a good backlog of ... See more

Choosing a Style

Once you know what topic you’re going to cover, you need to find a style that’s working that fits you.

Don’t just do whatever you want here, and don’t just copy over what style has worked on YouTube or Instagram. TikTok has a vibe you want to tap into, and if you don’t do that you’ll have a hard time getting picked up by the algori... See more

Bundling and Unbundling

Listicle-style videos tend to do well on TikTok, so think about how individual topics can be bundled into listicle videos, or listicle series, and how listicle videos can be unbundled into a number of individual videos.

For example, let’s say you have 20 different video ideas on “common beginner mistakes.” Could you do a “be... See more

High-Level Categories: What’s Working for Your Inspiration

The easiest way to come up with those ideas is to look through those five to ten accounts you liked and then see what topics of theirs have performed the best. Don’t copy what they say. But if a certain topic did well for one of them, especially if it did for multiple, your take on that top... See more