The Project for Awesome only works because of the tireless, all-day efforts of people like you. While we don’t encourage you to call in sick, or skip school, many people (including myself) have been known to spend a full 24 hours promoting P4A Videos.

So, how is it done!

SImple, just sign up for the P4A mailing list and keep an eye youtube and on this blog. As new videos are submitted they will be reviewed for quality and awesomeness. Those videos will then be sent out to everyone to promote.

Promotion is simple. Just rate the video (five stars, of course) and then start commenting. Sometimes I like to tell a story, but throughout several comments. So I’ll tell the story of the time I broke my big toe on a brick, but I’ll only post one sentence per comment. So, by the time I’m done with the story, I’ll have posted 25 or 30 comments!

The more comments on a video, the more views it gets. The Most-Discussed and Most-Viewed pages of youtube are the most viewed pages outside of the front page. So as more videos hit those pages, they’ll get more and more views, and more and more charities will be promoted!

Other techniques for rapid commenting include:

• Comment Conversations (find a friend, and have an instant message conversation…but in youtube comments!)
• Transcribing the video (line by line…one comment per line)
• Talking about charities (or spoons or kittens or democracy)
• Asking or Answering questions. (You might ask “who is your favorite novelist and why” or you might run into a similar question, and answer it.) I find these strings particularly fascinating.

Techniques for rapid commenting that are NOT OK include:

• Copying the same thing over and over
• Any Profanity
• One-Word Comments

Some notes. First, it’s easier to comment if you click on the “view all comments” option. That way you can find things to reply to, and reply more easily. This is especially helpful with conversations and question answering.

Second, YouTube will be quite curious whether or not you are a human. So, once you’ve submitted 10 or 20 comments, they’ll start requiring you to type in CAPTCHA codes. This is normal…and we’re all doing it. Since you are, in fact, a human, it doesn’t really matter, it just takes a little extra time.