The 5 Ways We Find Viral YouTube Video Ideas for Business Channels

On a business YouTube channel, the video idea decides the result more than anything else. If the idea is weak, people do not click, so the thumbnail, the script, the editing and the camera never get seen. Below are the five methods Nate Curtiss uses to find video ideas that reach a large audience, including your buyers, and four ways to make each idea your own.

Nate Curtiss walks through it in the full video.

Aiming only at your exact buyer keeps a channel small

Many business owners are told to go narrow and make videos only for their ideal customer, for example 35 year old American real estate developers earning over $100,000 a year. The problem is how YouTube works. It earns money when people watch ads, so it recommends videos that generate a lot of watch time. When a small channel posts a video that can only interest a few hundred people, YouTube does not know who to show it to. It shows the video to a small, mixed group, most of them do not click, and only a couple of your buyers see it.

The alternative is to aim for the largest audience inside your subject. You reach many people who will never buy, but you also reach nearly every buyer in your market. Nate describes a sales call with a prospect who had watched his one hour course three times and spent the call pitching himself to Nate. When you are the best known name in your industry, buyers contact you, and you are the first name people think of when someone asks for a referral.

Method 1: Use a new YouTube account to see what works in your niche

1. Create a new YouTube account with no watch history, for example one named "Your Name Research."

2. Search for terms related to your subject, such as real estate, SEO or digital marketing.

3. Find around 10 channels in your niche that are posting now and getting good views.

4. Open about 7 of each channel's top videos from the last year and let each one play for 30 to 60 seconds.

5. Scroll the home page, refresh it, and screenshot every video that did far better than its channel's average and that you could plausibly make.

This makes the new account behave like the first viewers YouTube would show your video to. When Nate did this for the make money niche, nearly every recommended video had over 100,000 views.

A video that does far better than its channel's average is called an outlier. A channel that averages 600 views per video and gets 30,000 views on one video has a 50x outlier. One outlier can be a fluke, so Nate confirms each idea by finding at least four other videos in the same format that were at least 2x outliers, had at least 50,000 views and were posted in the last 6 months. He uses the 1of10 browser extension and research tool for this. The 6 month limit matters because YouTube changes quickly.

Choose the concept first and work out the execution second. The question is not whether you feel strongly about a topic. The question is whether a format has worked and whether you can make a version of it. The only exception is a topic that would hurt your brand. Avoid videos about competitors, because if the video does well, they get the attention.

Method 2: Use formats that work in other niches

Look at the structure of a video, not its title. The debate channel Jubilee has run a format for years where 20 people debate one well informed person who disagrees with them. An entrepreneur in the business niche used the same format, and it became the most viewed video on his channel.

Nate uses three ways to find formats from other niches:

• Make more research accounts, one each for niches such as business, finance, fitness and entertainment.

• Watch content every day on TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. News often appears on TikTok and X before it reaches YouTube.

• Talk to other creators, including ones outside your niche.

For example, a singing coach made a video called "30 years of singing advice in X minutes," a format that had done well in the business niche. A business owner could make 30 years of sales advice in the same format.

Method 3: Bring trending topics into your niche

When a subject is popular across social media, a video that connects it to your niche tends to do well. At the time of the talk, Nate named Claude and AI avatars as examples. He had not posted on his own channel for months, then made a video about Claude, and it got a lot of views. Pair the trending topic with a format that has already been confirmed with the outlier research from Method 1.

Method 4: Turn short videos that did well into long videos

When a short video does well on YouTube Shorts, Instagram or TikTok, it is one of the strongest candidates for a long video. One creator had a 60 second short about going through many rounds of interviews at Goldman Sachs. The long version covered all the lessons he learned there. The short covered one lesson, and the long video covered about 15. This works with other people's shorts too, because Shorts viewers and long form viewers are largely the same people.

Method 5: Remake your best videos 6 to 12 months later

The same concepts get large view counts on YouTube again and again. If one of your videos does well, make it again 6 to 12 months later with new tools, new numbers and new content. You cannot repost the same video, but you can remake the concept. Alex Hormozi has made a video on how to grow an audience several years in a row, and the lowest view count that concept got was 300,000. Most people who see a remake never watched the first one.

Make each idea your own

Nate uses four changes so a video is better than the ones it is based on:

1. Make it longer when you have more useful material. Others made 10 to 15 minute Claude videos, and Nate made a one hour course. The goal is the most value you can give, not a target length.

2. Use better numbers. Add a time limit, a bigger number or an age.

3. Widen the audience. Remove jargon from the title and concept so more people understand it.

4. Add a twist. Instead of "how I made a million dollars at 20," make it "how I made a million dollars in sales at 20."

What this means for your business

A business channel does not need original ideas to grow. It needs formats that have already worked, adapted to what the founder knows, and aimed at the largest audience in the market so the buyers are included.

Viewz runs this process for founder-led businesses: the ideas, thumbnails, scripts and editing. The promise is 1 million views in 6 months that bring your business customers, or we keep working for free. Apply at viewz.gg