The Aftermath of a Viral Blog Post

Everyone wants one don’t they? A viral blog post. A flood of visitors, an email inbox blowing up, requests for interviews and of course, all the money that comes with such things.

Well, not quite for the last one.

I had not one, but two posts go viral on Medium within the space of a day this week. One post had sat completely unread for a couple of weeks before it got a couple of recommends, then a couple more and in a very short time it snowballed to the point where I was in the top 5 recommended posts on Medium. Even the manager of community engagement showed up and gave her thoughts in the comments. This post in turn caused another one of my posts, written last year, to start getting read and that blew up even more than the first. I was being shared on Facebook and Twitter, it was pretty crazy. Being far more polarising than the first post, it didn’t garner the same amount of recommends, but in terms of readers and intensity of response, it was twice as big.

Going viral is a very interesting experience, because it gives you an insight into human nature and how people think. Both of the articles had 98% of the commenters in agreement and thanking me for expressing the same feelings that they had. 1% of commenters disagreed but wrote really fantastic, cogent responses that challenged my point of view. There was 1% though, that either felt attacked, got the wrong message or missed the point of what I had to say entirely. That’s probably the first rule of being a writer on the Internet. Regardless of whether you go viral or not, realise that no matter how clear your argument is, no matter how well you may spell it out, people bring their own perspectives and prejudices to the table. Often, they’ll take what you’ve written in a way that completely baffles you, leaving you to think “did you even read my article, or was it someone else’s?” You simply can’t expect even the most well explained concept to get through to everybody in the way you wish.

Some people will highlight the paragraphs and sentences that make sense to you. Sometimes they find value in a sentence that you really didn’t expect to have that much punch to it. I had one guy respond to a post with a really interesting question. I answered it thinking it was the start of a great conversation, until his next response made a whole heap of assumptions and turned pretty much abusive.

Then there are the comments comments when you go viral: there are so many of them, how do you answer them all? I have a career and family, and I’ve been travelling a lot this week. I could have let myself get completely stressed and burned out about it – do I respond to all of them? I shouldn’t only respond to the bad ones, because that’s rewarding them and ignoring everyone else. They’ll think I’m a dick if I don’t respond. Do I have to recommend everyone’s responses? It’s enough to send you crazy. I didn’t let it stress me, because there was just no way I could keep up with it all and the reality is that in a couple of days (maybe sooner) everyone will have moved on and forgotten about it anyway.

The second interesting part of going viral, and writing for an audience in general, is that a lot of people think they know everything about who you are just from reading one piece of your work. I had all kinds of comments that made me laugh, which I’ll paraphrase as I’m not going to go trawling back through them:

“You’re an angry man and this is a hate filled rant”

“Just because you’ve given up on your dreams, have 2 crying kids and you can’t pay the bills” (that one was my favourite)

“You just wish you were like them. There is no other reason and you can’t say otherwise”

“You’re so negative, I’ll think twice before I read a post with your name at the top again”

I’m not going to bother going into who I really am as a person, or try to explain I’m not like the above comments say I am, because we as people make snap judgements about others all the time with very little information. It’s not a big deal. All I’d suggest is that, rather than making a judgement about someone from a single post, have a look at all their other work first. In my case, the two posts of mine that went viral were just fun little rants that took me 15 minutes or so to write. I took the filter off (which is why I sound so angry – because as an INTJ, when I take my filter off I sound incredibly aggressive and cold despite the fact that I’m really not angry) and just wrote what I was thinking at the time. I edited right there and then after I finished.

Check out most of my other work though, and you’ll find stuff that’s around the 10 minute read mark – posts that I spent hours on, going back to on an almost daily basis for weeks on end, tweaking words here and there, rethinking my assumptions and constantly improving. I’d wager that’s fairly true for a lot of what goes viral – it isn’t necessarily representative of the author’s body of work. I’m sure for most writers, the majority of their work goes unnoticed except by a limited amount of people and their followers. The viral post is just a nice reward and confirmation that you’ve unwittingly tapped into something that a lot of people have strong feelings about. That’s really all it is. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great piece of work, it doesn’t mean you’re some brilliant wordsmith or insightful sage and it doesn’t mean that you’re instantly going to get a book deal and have everyone clamouring for a piece of you.

I have been offered a podcast interview from it which is great. Not because I feel famous or popular, but because it’s a chance to talk more about what I love (writing) and to get more ideas out there. I’d wager that that will pretty much be it. My inbox has already slowed down with the notifications, so it looks like things are petering out and my 15 minutes is over as quickly as it began. I’ve enjoyed the moment and whether another will come anytime soon, or ever, doesn’t really worry me too much.

If you’re one of those writers out there who is trying with every fibre of their being to go viral, please do yourself a favour and stop. I was doing the same thing just 6 months ago, and it’s exhausting, not to mention extremely unsatisfying. I’m not going to blow sunshine up your ass and tell you “just write for you, and a viral post will come”. It may and probably won’t ever come for most people, and it just isn’t worth chasing after. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that no one cares about your work. Going viral doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things really. I love writing for its own sake and will continue to do it regardless. If you don’t love the writing itself, if you’re just looking to go viral, I say go and do something you actually enjoy. Don’t waste your time chasing after something that comes and goes within the blink of an eye.

PS: Someone suggested I start a rant podcast, which was a hilarious idea. Hell, I might even do it just for shits and giggles. I wrote a rant about the health and fitness industry flooding social media early last year, which I might throw up here next week if you’re after some more laughs.