social media | Connected Comedy

5 Tips For Stand Up Comedian Arbel Kodesh

In 5 Free Tips, I provide some advice specifically tailored to one person’s content. If you’d like me to give you 5 Free Tips, please send me an email and tell me a little about yourself.

Today’s free tips are for stand up comedian Arbel Kodesh, who sent me the following email:

Hi Josh,

My name is Arbel Kodesh. I’m a 21 year old stand up comedian currently living in Palo Alto California. I read your “5 Free Tips” and was wondering if you could help me out. I’ve been doing stand up for about a year and enjoy it a lot. I try to take advantage of every opportunity I get to perform but I still don’t feel like that’s enough. I really want to get a lot of people to see my material and what I’m about, and I don’t feel that performing once a week (normally in front of a lot of other comedians) is the way to get a following or get my name out.

Here are some links to some youtube videos of me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fm0ZyBpyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUbQgc4rzp4&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbStFyATZu8&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AssENJ8_OeM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpBC2GPrHWI&feature=related

I also have a facebook fanpage:

http://www.facebook.com/arbelkodesh

If you have any advice please let me know.

I really appreciate it!

-Arbel

I checked out Arbel’s work and came up with the following 5 Free Tips for him:

TIP #1: Pay Attention To Video Titles

If you’re looking to get more views of your videos, one simple thing you can do is title them in a way that will attract some views from people searching YouTube for similar stuff. For example, the videos on your channel are titled things like “Arbel on Celebrities,” and “Arbel on Coca Cola.” But it’s doubtful that anybody’s searching YouTube for “Arbel on…” anything because not many people know you yet.

I’d suggest instead titling the videos to include relevant words that people do search for. For example, your “Arbel on Celebrities” video includes a bit about the singer Pitbull who lots of people search for and those people will be most likely to “get” your joke. So titling your video something like “How Pitbull Records His Songs” might get you some extra views because it will show up as a related video when people are watching other Pitbull videos and the more interesting title might catch their eye and get you some easy clicks.

One more quick note about this. I would still include your name in the title, but you can put it after the headline. So the Pitbull video title would be, “How Pitbull Records His Songs – Arbel Kodesh.” I’d put your name after a hypen at the end of all of your videos because that will help them show up as related.

TIP #2: Start A Blog

You mentioned wanting to get your name out to more people and I’d highly recommend starting a blog of some sort. Whether you’re writing funny stuff on the blog, or even just sharing funny videos or links to interesting things you find, having a blog is a very easy way to give people a reason to start connecting with you. Making videos takes time and effort, but blogging can be much quicker and it starts to give people a reason to check out your site every day. They get in the habit of that, which comes in handy when you do have a new video or show you want to promote.

One more quick note about blogging: In general, I’d recommend posting stuff that will be of value to other people. Having a blog and just promoting your own stuff all the time is rarely compelling to readers so it’s much more effective if you’re sharing stuff that has real entertainment value to them. If you establish yourself as a source for funny or interesting content, people will definitely come back to see more.

TIP #3: Contribute To Other Sites

One of the most common traps I see comics fall into is that the content they create winds up only being seen by the same people that already follow them and as a result they’re never really adding new fans or growing their audience. One of the best ways to break out of this is to contribute to other sites or channels.

Don’t be afraid to do a guest post or video for somebody else and think of it as a way to introduce yourself to a new audience. And of course, the bigger the site, the more new fans you may be able to attract.

TIP #4: Post Things On Facebook That People Will Share

It’s great that you’ve got a Facebook fan page and it’s nice to see you’ve already got some good interaction on it. Just like with blogging, you can grow your Facbeook page by sharing valuable or entertaining content that people are going to want to share with their friends. All too often people think that the only stuff they should post on their Facebook page is their own creations and that’s just not true.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing a hilarious cat video that you’ve found online even if it has nothing specifically to do with you. As long as it’s entertaining, what will happen is your Facebook followers will share it with their friends and when they do those friends will see it as being shared “via Arbel Kodesh” which introduces you to a whole new audience.

Your goal on Facebook should be to post as much “shareable” content as possible, because the more people share what you post, the more people are introduced to your page, and the more people are likely to then follow you themselves.

TIP #5: Subscribe and Comment On Other YouTube Channels

YouTube is definitely a community and if you want to get more people subscribing and commenting on your videos, then you need to make yourself a part of that community. Right now, you’re not subscribed to any YouTube channels and I doubt that you comment on many videos. But think about this: Every time you comment on a video or subscribe to somebody’s channel, a link to your channel gets on their radar. It’s really free promotion for your channel.

In general, you’ll find that the more you become a part of the YouTube community, the more attention that community will pay to your own creations.

I hope this helps Arbel, and if anybody else would like to get 5 Free Tips, please let me know.

What The Death Of Digg Means For Comedy Content

Once upon a time (read: about 6 months ago), Digg was a king of the social media space and able to drive more traffic with a single link than just about any other site on the web. But those days are coming to an end…rapidly.

For those of you that have never heard of Digg, here’s a quick back story. Digg’s been around since 2004 and is essentially a site where anybody can post a link to an article or video on the web that they find interesting and the community of Digg users can vote up or down whether they think the link is worth your time.

If the link gets enough votes (according to Digg’s mysterious algorithms), it gets featured on the Digg front page and is rewarded with so much traffic that it will probably crash your site’s servers and knock you offline. Oh, the irony.

Because Digg’s front page is able to drive so much traffic, an underground industry developed of people who were willing to game the Digg voting system for a price. I won’t go into all the dirty details, but suffice it to say that there were people you could pay to get enough votes to essentially “guarantee” that your piece of content would hit the front page of Digg and receive a ton of traffic.

Constantly espousing the benefits of a “social news” system, Digg always spoke out against the gaming of its system and would regularly “ban” users and sites who it claimed were violating the rules of its game.

However, there was always a pretty clear double standard as certain “Power Diggers” and publishers always seemed able game the system and operate with immunity from Digg’s community policing.

A couple months ago Digg transitioned to a new format which was intended to limit some of the influence of the Power Diggers, undercut the “illegal” paid Digg market, and more evenly spread out the traffic people could receive from the site so that it was no longer a “front page or bust” situation. The only problem is that the “new Digg” has been nothing but a disaster.

Since launching the new version of the site, Digg has seen a drastic drop in traffic, a drop in its ability to send traffic elsewhere, and a slew of layoffs. But today brought even more titillating news, with a revelation that Digg may be gaming its own system for the benefit of its publishing partners. If you’re a social media or marketing geek, this analysis is a pretty interesting read. If you’re not, here’s a quick summary.

It appears that Digg has been creating its own “fake” accounts and gaming its own system in order to hit the front page with links that drive more traffic to its publishing partners (big companies that are paying them for traffic) and making it seem like those publishing partner’s stories are being naturally voted to the front page by the Digg community. Digg responded to the accusations by declaring that the fake accounts were just for testing purposes, which seems like a pretty weak excuse to me.

Anyway…

The demise of Digg and all its associated conspiracy theories has been fascinating to follow, but what impact will any of this have on the comedy world? Here’s a few thoughts I have about how a Digg-less world could impact the comedy web:

Get ready for a traffic (and revenue?) drop.

Comedy content has always done well on Digg and a lot of comedy sites receive a ton of their traffic from Digg (yeah, I’m looking at you Cracked and College Humor). As Digg crumbles, that traffic is not going to be easily replaced, which could have serious implications on sites that rely on it to generate the ad impressions they rely on for revenue.

Bloggers can go back to creating content for their actual audience.

No blogger wants to admit it, but if you’ve ever had a post hit the front page of Digg and saw the flood of traffic it sent to your site then you probably got a little addicted to the feeling. As a result, you probably started to create a few more posts specifically as Digg-bait (even if you knew they weren’t necessarily things your particular audience would love) in the hopes of getting another hit like any true junkie.

In case you ever wondered why just about every post on every comedy blog is a list of crazy/wacky pictures, the reason is that those posts tended to do very well on Digg. If there’s no more Digg audience to attract, my guess is you’ll see a lot fewer of these posts which is probably a good thing.

Digg is dead. Long live Reddit!

Reddit is another social news site that was basically considered Digg’s main rival. That said, it wasn’t nearly as big as Digg (until recently) despite in my opinion being a much better site. The reason it wasn’t as big as Digg? Probably because it wasn’t nearly as easy to game and therefore not nearly as reliable a traffic driver (Note: Reddit can also drive a lot of traffic if you post links to good content on Reddit. The difference is that on Digg you could get a lot of traffic to mediocre or bad content if you gamed the system. That’s much more difficult to do on Reddit). Now, with Digg out of the picture, you’re already seeing people turning to Reddit in the hopes of finding and promoting great content.

It’s a reminder of the dangers of relying on marketing platforms you don’t control.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the past few years is that it’s always dangerous to rely too much on a platform you don’t control for your own marketing purposes and this is a perfect example of why. There’s a lot of sites that lived off of Digg traffic in the past couple years and built nice businesses on Digg’s back. But now, Digg’s about to disappear and in some cases drag those audiences with them into the abyss. Does this mean you shouldn’t try to get traffic wherever you can? Of course not. But it does mean that you should always be trying to capture your own audience and not just assume that you’ll always be able to tap into a traffic faucet like Digg is was.

That’s how I see the death of Digg affecting the comedy world. What do you think?