Going Viral and Failing Miserably

One of the things that I think most writers want to achieve these days is to go viral, in other words to write something that gets picked up by the internet community, and they run with it, forwarding it on to all their friends, so that within days it travels around the world, and scores thousands if not millions of page views.

This is one of my goals on my path to getting noticed as a writer, but so far I have failed miserably.

One of my first articles on Associated Content was How To Add A Control Button To An Excel Spreadsheet, and I thought that this would do well, and it did with a few hundred visits, but then trickled off. I keep meaning to write more technical guides, as these do lend themselves to receiving regular traffic.

I took a big risk with the very next article, What If Farts Were Colored? and thought that just maybe it would take off, but the traffic was really very light, although people did find it funny.

My next big break, or so I thought, was to write about The Dangers Of Evony, how easy it is to become addicted to the latest breed of internet computer games, and to spend your life addicted to them. I thought that this would for sure make the big time, but alas no. I have had regular traffic, but to date still nowhere close to 1,000 page views.

My most successful article so far then followed, a news story about a hotel in London that offered Human Bed Warmers. This received a lot of traffic, but as I expected it fell off pretty soon.

I tried writing some articles about the Wii Fit and my experiences, but only several hundred page views followed. I also hurt my foot while jogging on the spot in our living room, so that put paid to my career as a journalist writing about my long distance jogging.

By this time it was mid February, with Valentines Day and Saint Patrick's Day approaching, and I got into a poetic mood, writing a number of Limericks, and creating a lens on Squidoo about Limericks For Saint Patrick's Day, which did nowhere near as well as I expected, however it did and still does provide a lot of back links for those authors whose Limericks I included, so maybe next year we will all get renewed visits to the poems that we created this year.

I changed style then and started to go through my photograph collection, posting amongst other things A Lobster Tale, hoping that people would come up with witty captions for this. Just a few noticed unfortunately and I failed to go viral yet again.

More serious articles then followed, like Cultural Differences Between The UK And USA, and then I had the idea to start what would become my weekly article, Offbeat News. Unfortunately, this first edition was published at a time when notifications were failing to go out, and so it had not even 20 visits in the first week. I was beginning to despair.

Then my big break, or so I thought, when I suddenly got the Windows Browser Ballot Screen on my laptop one morning. Having found out how to ditch this unwanted Microsoft pop up screen, I published a slide show, but no - this again failed to get more than a few hundred page views, despite my posting it to all the sites that I know. Drat...

I wrote articles on the importance of Computer Backups, and then found inspiration for my two most successful articles to date, ChatRoulette - The Latest Internet Phenomenon and Fun On Chat Roulette. Between them, these two are giving me about 100 page views a day consistently and both now have over 1,000 page views in total, but I still am hoping for my big break.

Coming up to date, passing through several weeks where I have suffered from a mild case of writers block, and published a number of slide shows, due to lack of time and the ideas to write on other subjects, we come to a recent article that I thought might do well, One Of The Scariest Moments In My Life. Although this has been successfully viewed from within the Associated Content community, I have still failed to break out into the wide world with this or the article that completed the story.

A few days ago I thought that I had another break, with my publication of The Flying Spaghetti Monster photograph, but I think this topic is past it's boom days, and so far it's not made it, but there is still time. The Pastafarian Religion and it's symbol the Flying Spaghetti Monster are still popular, as are it's theories that the reduction in the number of Pirates in recent years has coincided with the rise in average temperature.

Finally we come to today's short story, A Most Amazing Story, which has so far managed to escape unnoticed or at least not been commented that much. This story is truly amazing, and has a special significance for anyone reading it on the date that it was published, especially if they can figure out the secret that the story holds.

So here I am still waiting for something to go viral, and for a rapid rise from Clout 6 1/2 to Clout 7 and beyond.

Good Luck everyone with your page views in April, and I wish you all a Happy Easter.