I Went Viral 2 Times By Ignoring Every Content Strategy Rule
The advice writing coaches don’t want you to hear
It was 2 AM in San Francisco.
I just got back from a horrific date with a beautiful girl. We went to a baseball game to see my Orioles play the Giants, and she got upset because I was too quiet.
Truthfully, I just loved watching baseball. I mean I paid like $80 to go to the game, so I was going to watch the game!
I was so upset because I felt I did nothing wrong. I paid for her ticket, our food, and we did talk a little bit, but I wanted to watch my favorite team, too.
I sat there, staring at the dark ceiling, wide awake.
‘F*** this,’ I thought.
‘I’m gonna write. I’m just sitting here doing nothing anyway!’
I opened up a draft on The Huffington Post, where I was a contributor in 2016, and began writing.
“11 Things You Need To Know About Introverts”
90 minutes later I finished that blog post, edited it, and blasted it off into the internet.
I went to bed, and slept like a baby until 9 AM.
When I woke up, I opened Facebook to see I had like 50 new notifications. ‘Ah f***,’ I thought. I quickly realized MY FRIENDS WERE SHARING MY ARTICLE! I was getting tagged left and right.
I opened up the Huffington Post to see my article on the front freaking page. My writing was on the front page of one of the best websites on the internet! I was over the moon.
Not only that, but traffic to my personal website spiked. I had 500 hits in a single day, which was a far cry from the 10 hits I normally received daily. This was the first time I ever went viral on the internet, and when you think about it, it didn’t have the hallmarks of a typical viral post.
I wasn’t following a content calendar.
I wasn’t sticking to my niche.
I didn’t have a strategy.
I just wrote something at 2 AM fueled by sheer emotion and doinked it off into the internet 90 minutes later. It was the blogging equivalent of a drunk text, and unlike most drunk texts, it was received very well.
Best drunk text ever!
(I wasn’t drunk)
How I Made $6,000 In 6 Hours With 1 Video
A few years later, I was in the Philippines on an extended trip. I had a Facebook Page where I published videos about Filipino culture, and I had a couple of them get over 1,000,000 views.
At that point I had something like 70,000 likes on my page. It was just insane the response I got to my videos.
Disaster Drama was about to strike, though.
Miss Philippines just won the Miss Universe pageant, and if you know anything about Filipinos, it’s that they love their beauty pageants.
Catriona Gray was the winner in 2018, and she drew some controversy online for an answer she gave about what the biggest life lesson she ever learned was.
She mentioned that her experience working in the slums of Manila taught her to always have a "grateful heart." She emphasized the need to see beauty in difficult situations and choosing to remain optimistic despite challenges.
Truthfully, I loved her answer. I had already seen a lot of poverty in the Philippines, and somehow the people in the worst poverty there remained so optimistic. It defied logic to my Western brain.
But she got embroiled in drama. Critics—who probably never helped anyone in poverty in their lives—criticized Catriona for romanticizing poverty and all that.
It made me absolutely furious, and even though my vlog’s topic wasn’t beauty pageants, I set out to make a video about it right away.
I wrote the script in an hour.
I shot the video in 30 minutes.
I edited the video in 4 hours.
I uploaded and published it in 30 minutes.
Guys, this video did bonkers numbers.
It was like a rocket ship. It just immediately took off. I used to have this metric in my head where, if I got 1 share per minute in the first hour of a video going live, that it had a great chance of going viral. It had like 64 shares after the first hour.
After 24 hours it had 1,000,000 views, and after a few days, it was up near 4,000,000 total views.
This one video—no lie—made me $6,000 in ad revenue. I made $6,000 from 6 hours of work.
Many Of My Biggest Viral Posts Happened When I Wasn’t Following A Strategy
These viral moments were completely unplanned.
I never thought about my strategy, or my niche, or my content calendar.
I got angry and drunk texted the internet, basically. That’s what happened. And it felt really good.
I think there’s a place for strategy, for sure. But I also feel, more often than not, strangled by a rigid strategy.
“Okay, on Monday write about how you quit every platform and only write about Substack. Great. On Tuesday write about how 30 subscribers is a classroom full of people. Awesome. On Wednesday…”
Crap, man! Does this get on anybody else’s nerves? As a creative person, I don’t want my future to be predetermined. That leaves NO room for creativity.
It’s like how Vin Diesel keeps making Fast and the Furious movies. Yeah, they make money, but…doesn’t it get boring to make like 12 movies in the same franchise IN A ROW?
Christopher Nolan is my favorite movie director, and he always does different stuff every few years. He’s making an Odyssey movie right now based on Homer’s book. In 2023 he made a movie about Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. In 2014 he made Interstellar, a sci-fi epic comparable to better than 2001: A Space Odyssey.
What if he just made like 5 sequels to Interstellar instead?
It seems like all the online biz coaches—if they coached movie directors—wouldn’t hesitate to tell them to make 8 sequels to their hit movie.
Sometimes you just gotta create something because you feel it! How about that?!
Sometimes you got to say “to hell with the strategy” and just go make something because you want to.
That’s real creativity. “The use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.”
Having original ideas, by definition, means breaking the mold. It means that you’re taking people in a new direction they’ve never experienced before.
That’s why all the new Star Wars movies will never top the originals. They broke the mold at the time. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
Here’s a brutal truth: All the writing coaches all teach the same damn thing. All of em. We’re all saying the same stuff. That’s why the internet feels like such a cluster f***. It feels like some hustle bro spawned like 100 clones of himself, and they all spawned clones of themselves, and now we’re just in a sea of content bullsh*t trying to find the shore.
You know how to stand out in this crazy world?
DO. THINGS. DIFFERENTLY.
Write a post about popcorn once. I don’t care. Write a one-off post about the death of your grandparent. Go. People will appreciate you breaking the mold because so many of us are following the same B.S. advice from all the personal branding coaches to just keep talking about the same stuff over and over and over again.
The real hack?
Be yourself.
It’ll surprise people.
Definitely some great food for thought in here. There's a lot of pieces out there about making sure you include a laundry list of items in your writing, which yes, is true to an extent to keep readers engaged somewhat. But when we do that, it still feels way too close to the mantra of needing to write for the algorithms of other platforms.
Exactly 💯 I am not the one ever to follow the rules..there's so much more to it. Some of it can't even be put it words..but is happening on another Plainfield all together.
Trust the flow.