The 5 Critical Keys to Making Something Go Viral

On the other hand, here’s a little bit more of what was possible back then:

This image pulled a million likes in 24 hours in May & it’s still active. 2.262 million likes https://t.co/XalQC8y31W pic.twitter.com/Zxdi7SMFhh

— John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn) October 19, 2014

If you don’t have an engine, then you still need someone with an engine to get you there. For example, there are people who have built fairly successful websites around regularly getting Drudge links. Is it possible that your viral content can just take off on its own with an individual or organization that brings major traffic pushing it? Yes, but that does not happen very often. Eminem, Fox News, and some Instagram model with 3 million followers have about a thousand times better chance of something they do going viral than a regular person who does exactly the same quality of content.

3. Uniqueness is important

How can you go nuclear if everybody is saying what you’re saying? You’ve got to be saying something new; you’ve got to have a new take; you’ve got to come up with that thing everyone is thinking but doesn’t quite realize themselves. That’s why Right Wing News regularly did human interest stories other conservative news services weren’t doing. We needed something intriguing and different to draw people in outside of our normal audience. In fact, I still remember someone I know telling that her liberal friends were regularly sharing Right Wing News stories. Those relatively unique human interest stories were the ones they were sharing. Ironically, this part of the equation is why fake news and conspiracy theories have a higher than average potential to go viral. After all, if you write “It Has Finally Happened! Trump Has Thrown Hillary in Jail Over This,” or “Hard Proof That the Illuminati Were Behind Republican Election Losses,” you will have no competition and thus can clean up every potential reader for a subject. This is also one of the reasons you see articles that seem to be such horrible hot takes. If you write “Every White Man Is a Potential Rapist,” or “When You See a MAGA Hat, Put a Bullet in It,” you will get a certain trollish group of people who read it and share it along with a large group of haters who show up to read the article. If you get lucky, you may even have articles written about how awful it is, which drives even more traffic. In today’s world, being notorious is almost as good as being famous. It’s a poisonous game, but an awful lot of people are playing it.

4. You need energy

When I trained people to pick stories at Right Wing News, the number one thing I hammered home beyond “don’t deceive your readers; always be honest,” was “have an emotional hook for your story.” When you live in a world where you’re competing for attention with the latest cute cat videos, insane conspiracy theories, and a new video from Machine Gun Kelly, people need to have some reason to choose your information. When people are making that decision, junk food beats eating your vegetables 99 percent of the time. In other words, if you make people feel something, they click; if you don’t make them feel anything, they pass and click something that does. Sadly, that means that most people pass on the substantive policy issues in order to read the outrage of the day, but if your goal is to be viral, you have to adjust to the world as it is, not as you want it to be. The more energy there is around an issue, the better chance there is for it to go viral. For example, the hottest piece I did for PJ Media this year passed a quarter of a million views. It was called the Five Big Problems with Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony at the Kavanaugh Hearings. It was well written, had a good title, came out the same day as her testimony, and most importantly, covered a subject as hot as molten lava on the Right. If I had written it a day later, it would have been lucky to do a tenth of the traffic, but right then when the energy level around the subject was at its absolute peak, it was just what the doctor ordered to drive traffic.

5 Headlines create clicks

Here’s an ugly truth about the social media era: headlines are 90 percent of the battle because that’s all most people see before they choose to click a link. If you wrote the best article on the Internet today but have a mediocre headline, chances are no one is going to read it. On the other hand, great headlines can often draw tons of traffic to lousy articles — hence the clickbait articles that everyone gets so huffy about. “All she did was stick her hand in the water and you won’t believe what happened next!” “Baby hippos see snow for the first time and they do this…” “112-year-old man gives his secret to living a long life. Whiskey, cigarettes, and…..”  Know why people do those? THEY WORK! You’re probably dying to click on those articles right now and I just made them up off the top of my head. You may say, “But, I’m not writing anything! I’m a musician!” Then what’s the chorus of your song? “I’m a politician!” Then what’s your slogan? “I’m doing a speech!” Then what’s the memorable part at the beginning and end? You need something memorable that’s going to cut through the noise, whether it’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” “Where’s the beef?” or “Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but here’s my number: so call me maybe.”

Incidentally, there are many things that are difficult to make go viral at all — most technical, nuanced explainers and serious policy issues, for example. Also, even if you do everything right, you will miss far more often than you hit when you’re trying to make things go viral. That’s the nature of the game and you should never forget it.