Today we’re going to pick up from where we left off last week in Part II of the “Writer’s Guide to Going Viral.” In case you missed it, you can access Part I here.
I’m just getting back to Vermont after delivering an all-day workshop yesterday for the Power Players Mastermind (the photo of the group above), where I went deep into some of the ideas we’re going to explore in today’s issue.
The invitation came from my friend and client Lise Keuker, who has built an incredible $65M business, StudioGrow, serving the boutique fitness industry.
BTW – Lise will be among the incredible group of entrepreneurs at my upcoming Return to Real Vermont Farm Mastermind Experience next month. This event is now FULL, but you can get on the waitlist for the next mastermind event here.
Lise is also one of 20 entrepreneurs who have already pre-ordered 100 copies of Return to Real to share with their audience as soon as the book goes live. If you would like to get EARLY ACCESS to the book, make sure you are on the ReturnToRealBook.com priority list. I have some BIG NEWS coming on that front very soon.
With all that said, let’s pick things up where we left off in last week’s [Issue #107].
If you remember from Part I of this “Writer’s Guide to Going Viral,” we covered:
- The “Four Ways to Go Viral” (and why three of those ways will kill your credibility…)
- My “Secret AI Prompt” for going viral (which you can copy/paste/steal for yourself…)
- And the first two of the “5 Viral Factors” that will determine whether what you create even has a chance of going viral…
Those factors again are:
- Factor #1: Hacking the Zeitgeist
- Factor #2: The Holy Grail of Hooks
Which brings us to where we left off, the three remaining Viral Factors, beginning with:
FACTOR #3 · Opening Lines for Opening Minds
The job: grab attention.
By “Hacking the Zeitgeist” you’ve earned the impression. By using the “Holy Grail of Hooks” you’ve stopped the scroll.
Now the reader gives you one sentence to prove it was worth it.
Your first line of copy is something you should obsess over. Does your opening line grab your reader by the throat and pull them in?
The viral “Shape of Enshittification” piece opened with six words:
“It turns out, slop has a shape.”
Compare that to another issue of The Digital Contrarian that did really well on YouTube but didn’t get much traction on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Substack: “Is the AI Bubble Bursting?“
That piece opened like this:
“This past week, I was in Newport, Rhode Island, where I delivered the opening keynote at the Newport Global Summit, a billionaire investor event.”
It was authority-establishing, sure. But it definitely didn’t grab the reader by the throat. The rest of the piece was solid. But because the opening line was kind of meh, it never got as much viral traction as it could’ve.
FACTOR #4 · The Edge Effect Experience
The job: get the read.
For something to be shared, it first has to be read all the way through. So how do you keep a stranger reading?
You take them somewhere they have never been. In permaculture there’s a principle called the Edge Effect (something I write about in detail in Return to Real.)
The Edge Effect is the boundary where two ecosystems meet. Forest and meadow, land and water. It’s where you find the greatest biodiversity and the most life. The interesting things grow at the edges, because the edge combines conditions that don’t normally coexist.
The same is true for ideas.
The viral piece wired together a writing study, a culture interview, platform theory, book-sales data, and a personal story, all threaded onto a single motif. None of those pieces were new on their own. But the way in which they were connected was completely unique:
- 2 | Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore.
- 3 | The Beginning of the End of Social Media?
- 4 | Books That No Longer Get Read.
- 5 | An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed.
When you connect ideas from diverse worlds that don’t normally talk to each other, the connection itself feels like something the reader has never encountered before, and they keep going to see where it lands.
It reads like a whodunit. People finish it and will comment or message you some version of:
“I couldn’t stop reading. I had to see where it went.”
So the question to ask yourself here is this:
Are you taking your readers on an unexpected journey? Are you delivering an “Edge Effect Experience” by connecting ideas from the different worlds that you’re involved in and in turn offer a new and novel (and insightful) perspective to your reader?
FACTOR #5 · Validation & Vindication
The job: earn the share.
Here is the one that actually gets your piece passed along. And it took me an while to both “get” this and accept this.
People share things that leave them feeling seen, and proven right. They do not share things that argue against their worldview. Instead, they share things that hand them better language for a worldview they already hold.
So the key here, if you want to get your work re-shared, re-posted, re-stacked, re-whatever, is that you need to give people two things:
- Validation – Giving people fresh words for something they have felt but could never quite name. This leaves your reader feeling seen, heard, and understood.
- Vindication – Giving people evidence that proves them right, plus a sense of agency, by giving something they can take in their life and implement.
Now look. You might wish it worked otherwise. Like, you could write something that goes viral by changing people’s minds and reshaping how people see the world. But people will share what reinforces their current worldview and leaves them feeling validated and vindicated. You can grieve that fact or you can accept it and work within it.
In this particular piece, the most quoted line was a line I borrowed from Return to Real: “Slop is cheap, but real is rare. And rare is what people will pay for.” It gave people words for a thing they already felt in their gut, and a sense of agency that they can actually do something about it.
How do you know what will leave your readers feeling validated and vindicated?
It can be helpful to map out the landscape of your market based on the conflicting world views that might exist.
1 | Mapping The "World View" of Your Market.
With my work and research at the crossroads of AI and authenticity, I’ve identified that there are four camps as it relates to AI, which I write about in Return to Real:
From Chapter 2 of Return to Real:
The degree of optimism varies wildly from one room to the next. But among those paying the closest attention, the responses tend to fall into one of three broad camps:
- Foolishly optimistic: “AI will fix everything. Robots will farm for us and nobody will be poor.”
- Painfully ignorant: “Nothing is going to change. Don’t buy into all the AI hype.”
- Cripplingly afraid: “We’re headed into techno-feudalism and we will all be serfs.”
But there is a fourth camp. One that’s far more nuanced—what we might call realism without collapse, hope without naivety. A group that believes the truth is in the tension, because at least one thing is for certain: we are in uncharted territory. And the future is not yet written.
My writing is focused on reaching that fourth camp.
And inspired by a Washington Post piece that visualizes how Americans are split into nine political groups (see below), using Claude, I created my own visual representation of the four camps I’ve seen emerge as it relates to AI.
(This is a valuable exercise for you to consider in your market as it relates to the issues you write about.)
Please note the actual percentages in the graphic on the right are rough estimates and should not be interpreted literally.
2 | The Viral Scorecard: How to Predict If YOUR Content Will Go Viral?
When I was going through this retrospective, I did something that turned out to be the most useful exercise of the whole process. I built a scorecard. I took the viral “Shape of Enshittification” piece along with four other pieces I recently wrote, and I scored every one of them, one through ten, across all five factors. Fifty points possible:
The scores tell a story on their own. The viral “Enshittification” piece landed a 47. The “Is The AI Bubble Bursting?” piece I mentioned earlier (the one that did well on YouTube, but which didn’t get major traction on any other platform) only scored a 24. Three pieces I was proud of, and that warm readers genuinely liked, came in at 30, 23, and 34. None of them went viral.
But the real lesson only shows up when you read across the rows instead of down the columns. Check it out:
If you look at Factor #4, the Edge Effect Experience, the writing is generally strong across this sample. This is not where good pieces die.
In this sample, the collapse happens, every single time, at Factor #2 and Factor #3. The hook and the opening line.
You can run this same scorecard on your own work. We do it with all our Return to Real Agency Clients. It will tell you, fast, exactly where your content is lacking.
3 | The One Big Mistake I Wish I Could Take Back
In many ways, this piece was a perfect storm. But I made ONE major mistake with it.
At the very end, I dropped in an invitation to a $25,000 private VIP day. At the time, it made sense in my head, because I’d just wrapped one with a client and it was top of mind.
Then the piece started blowing up and reaching a massive cold audience.
A cold audience is not going to meet a stranger for the first time and hand them $25,000. BUT they might buy your book.
Mid-week, I realized I’d squandered a massive opportunity, and asked my team to swap the call to action for something with almost no friction, an invitation to get on my Return to Real pre-launch notification list.
Hundreds of people raised their hand within hours. Had that been there from the very start, when the piece was cresting, it would have been thousands.
4 | The REAL SECRET to Producing Content That Goes Viral in YOUR Market.
I don’t want to leave you thinking any of this was a single lucky swing.
It wasn’t. Quantity is the prerequisite for quality. In Return to Real, I describe this as Creative Fecundity, and it’s the same pattern Adam Grant lays out in Originals:
Mozart, Frida Kahlo, Edison, all of them produced an enormous volume of work to arrive at a small handful of superlative pieces. For me, this took 104 issues. Two years of writing, every week, without missing a single week, before a piece I wrote finally popped on every platform at once, going completely viral, and reaching over a million people across the internet.
The problem of course, is that volume without a rock-solid strategy is just noise. You can’t just throw out random acts of content and spray and pray your way to something that sticks.
Volume only works when there is a system behind it:
- Establishing clear Category of One Positioning.
- Publishing a unique Single Source of Truth.
- Building a robust Strategic Content Ecosystem.
This is exactly what we do for entrepreneurs looking to build a personal brand built around original thought leadership.
Our entire approach is designed to build authority, credibility, and trust in your market – and ultimately transform your POV into inbound demand for the products and services you sell.
If this sounds like something you might like help with, I want to invite you to apply to work with me and my team through our Return to Real Agency.
We are about to open up a handful of spots for new clients (which we haven’t done in months), meaning if you’re reading this right now, your timing is perfect.
* * *
Okay, we’re going to wrap things up here for today.
But not before leaving you with a photo from the farm:
This is Malcolm. One of our pigs enjoying grass and a bit of shade while spending his morning out on fresh pasture.
Have a GREAT rest of your weekend.
Remember to hug the ones you love.
And until next week,
Ryan :-)
