4 Ways To Ensure Your Article Will Never Go Viral.

When I founded Tremendous News in February 2009, I said to myself:

I will make this site so super viral people will use the term “tremendousy newsy” instead of “viral”.

Example.

Hey Todd!  Did you see that hot vid of a monkey peeing into his own mouth?  It went Tremendousy Newsy in like 3 hours!

Dude, did you just say “hot vid”?

Yeah.

So lame, man. So lame. Who says “hot vid”?

Dude, your name’s “Todd.”  I can pretty much say anything I want.

But Tremendous News! never went viral.  In fact, I had just a handful of readers.  My traffic ranking trailed that of LiquidationWorldOrlando.com which went out of business in October 2003.

Sucks.

They had nice pants.

Here’s what I do on my site.

If you want to make your articles go viral, don’t do any of these.

1. Swear The Fuck Out.

My natural writing voice is profane and obscene.  So even when I write about the economic stimulus bill, I manage to crowbar in “shitface fucktard” into a commentary of blind reverse auctions of toxic bank assets.

This makes people label me “NSFW”

Not Safe For Work.

This will immediately kill the lifeblood of your article.  

Let’s try an example. Here’s two options.  Which would you rather click?

Why is Silver The Best Investment Today?

Why is Bitch-Ass Silver Not a Piece-of-Shit Investment?

Ha!

I punished you with one of those.

And you know exactly how.

2. Piss Off Every Social Media Site.

The first thing I do after writing an article is immediately submit it to social media sites like Digg and Reddit.  Then I StumbleUpon my own article.  Then I will write a comment about my own article, pretending like I’m just a regular reader and not the writer himself.

12:00AM New article posted on Tremendous News: Why Is Bitch-Ass Silver Not a Piece of Shit Investment?

12:01AM Submitted to Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon by tremendousN

12:02AM New Comment on Why Is Bitch-Ass Silver Not a Piece of Shit Investment?: “Hey man great article.  Everyone should read this and send it to their friends.  Great job author!  – tremendousN

12:03AM Buried on Digg, Reddit, and never StumbledUpon.

12:04AM New Comment on Why Is Bitch-Ass Silver Not a Piece of Shit Investment?: Lame, man.  So lame.  – Todd.

3. Piss Off Every Big Guy On Twitter.

There are several individuals on Twitter that can make or break your article.  The Power Brokers Of Nerdy Fortune.  In their super-nerdy ways, they have amassed a devastatingly large number of followers.  So if you piss them off, they’ll tweet something like this.

Hey people!  Tremendous News is a pretty good site.  If you like comas.

Then they will tweet out hundreds of links to Beautiful New Wordpress Themes and Why Twitter Is The New Broadcasting Medium.

In other words, they will destroy you.

Here is the current status of my relationship with every Twitter Power Broker. If you’re not on this list, I have yet to piss you off.

Or you have me blocked.

Or you’ve never heard of me.

@GuyKawasaki: Dicey.  Guy is undecided about TN being on AllTop.com because it  has no focus.  That’s fair.  It doesn’t.  Except for a laser-beam focus on bitch-ass silver.

@zaibatsu: Who even knows?  Doesn’t reply to my DMs.  Possibly because I bore him with hundreds a day.  And most of them are explicit.

@mashable: Piss-poor. No attention.  So in response, this is what I do when I meet nerdy girls at the bar.

Hey do you know the site mashable?  That good looking guy who runs it is my older brother.

Really?  No way! Because you’re really fat and kind of gross.

Genetics.  He’s giving me seed money for my site, Tremendous News dot com.

Is that an extension cord holding your pants up?

@iamkhayyam: Decent. Told me my site’s “not as bad as it looks” What does that even mean?

@jason_pollock: Decent. Although I think he NSFW’s me secretly when I’m not looking.

@mayhemstudios Great!  Will promote pretty much anything on TN.  In fact, if you’re reading this because he linked it?  Told you.

@webaddict @phaoloo @buzzedition @tommytrc @murnahan No idea who I am.

4. Write the Worst Headlines.

Most articles have amazing headlines.  Mine are plagued with grammatical problems.  If you scroll through the sidebar on your right, you’ll notice that I’ve pretty much reduced this site to dozens of lists.  Every day with the lists.  It’s because I know why you click on lists, and now I’m too frightened that any non-list article will be horrible.

Also, I’m alarmingly lazy.

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That’s what I have so far.  I appreciate you adding your own thoughts.

I’ll be here monitoring the brainstorm.

Watching hot vids of monkeys peeing in their mouth.

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