10 Reasons Why Your Epic Medium Post Didn't Go Viral.

1. Your post was too long.

15 mins?! nobody has fifteen minutes for a well thought out, extensively researched, long-form article about the sleeping habits of Guatemalan bats and the effect that has on stock market machinations. Obviously, that particular story is amazing and will eventually get picked up by a film studio and turned into a cross between ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ hopefully starring ‘Fools Gold’ era McConaughey — so why would I bother ruining that bit of awesome by wasting 15 minutes reading the source material?

2. It wasn't about your failed start up.

Nobody wants to read about your successful Startup. Besides, that’s not even the point of a Startup. Everyone knows that it’s important that your first few Startups fail — not because it’s part of a ‘learning curve’ ultimately leading to a highly successful start-up, but because those initial failures are there to make good reading when a magazine supplement finally does a piece on your success story. How do you expect a journalist to fill a 2000 word essay on you without a bit of drama? — (a past drug habit and a near death experience wouldn't go astray either)

Don’t have a Startup? what are you even on Medium for? — just make something up, give it a name, drop the second last letter out of that name, make it a website, and let it die — now you can write about it!

4. You failed to mention Apple, Millennials or Startups.

Come on. You didn't mention any of these? I mean, you don’t actually have to write anything about them — just mention them once or twice and now you can add them as tags. See?

3. Your post doesn't offer any advice based solely on your very specific situation.

Nobody wants your five tips for ‘being more productive’. That’s going to sound like a boring lecture from one of your boring old high school teachers who was boring enough to have a list devoted to being productive — when really, everyone knows list making is a procrastinators number one tool - I bet that teacher made that list while putting something else off. Anyway, get overly specific! How about instead, you offer up “Five tips for finding the best place to work on your failing start-up while waiting for a connection in that really crappy part of Milan’s international airport that’s currently undergoing renovations’’ — that’s what people really want to know.

5. You don’t work at Medium.

What do you mean you don’t work at Medium in some capacity? everyone here works at Medium. How are you even posting here when you don’t actually work at Medium? By the way, working at Medium is the best. I really love it.

6. It’s not a story about how your last story went viral

For a story to go viral it’s important that your last story went viral, so you can talk about how your twitter feed totally blew up and you had to take the day off and sit in a park for a bit. So, before you write your viral medium post, be sure to have an existing medium post that went viral that you can talk about. If you don’t have that, just link back to your medium post that went viral about your medium post that went viral… then write about that.

7. Your post doesn't have a nonsensical evocative image to go with it.

See that old man sitting on the bench? You have no idea who he is do you? Is he the author of this story? is he the dead guy from True Detective? or is he all of us? all our hopes, dreams, and fears, tied up into one solitary mystery man staring out into an abyss of non-viral medium posts? Or maybe that’s just the photo that was staring back at me when I eventually got bored of scrolling through Unsplash. I guess you’ll never know.

8. You didn't make your post into a list.

See? it doesn't even have to have ten things! That’s right, I lied! So just put a number on it! doesn't even matter, because people love lists! (Ironically, there’s only 1 reason Buzzfeed is so highly successful). Writing a heartfelt obituary about your late grandmother? That piece is going nowhere unless you rename it “20 reasons why my Gran was totally epic” — did I mention using the word ‘Epic’? yeah, get that in there too. Now recommend this story you bastards, otherwise I’ll break your legs (that’s what my old Gran would have said).

9. You didn't make wholesale threats to your readers.

See how I subtly just threw down some threats of violence? Threats of violence are never acceptable, unless you need to garner some recommendations for your Medium post. So DO IT. DO IT NOW.