Category: Weirdness

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How to Write A Viral Internet Post

Excellent post from Pleated Jeans

Every once in a blue moon, a post here at Pleated Jeans takes off on the Internet. Because of this, I get the occasional friend or acquaintance asking me what the secret is to creating a viral Internet post that will eventually be viewed by hundreds of thousands people. Well if you’re expecting me to give you some magical formula for success…then you’re in luck! Because that’s exactly what I’m going to do:

Refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Internet Needs, and you’ll see that Internet users require pictures of cats more than anything else. As such, you should go to great lengths to make cats the primary focus of your Internet post – even if this means ditching your original topic of choice (sorry, AIDS prevention, you’re outta here).

For well over a year, Pleated Jeans was a site devoted completely to text posts. It took me a long time to realize that no one goes to the Internet to read (that’s what libraries and master bathrooms are for). In fact, I’ll wager 95 percent of my “readers” have skimmed over all the text in this post and only digested all the adorable pictures of cats – which means I can say pretty much anything I want right now and it wouldn’t really matter. Hail Satan banana zombie pizza.

If you simply HAVE to write something, do yourself a favor and find a way to work the most important points into graphical form:

See, that chart right there pretty much sums up what all these dumb words have been trying to say.

In my experience, topical posts tend to do better than non-topical posts (example: Inception Flowchart is one of my most popular posts of all time). When looking to bolster interest in your Internet post, consider asking yourself these questions:

  • What movies are popular right now?
  • Any holidays coming up?
  • Has Justin Bieber said anything stupid today?
  • Have any cats made the news recently?
  • Has someone recently given the advice to “hide yo kids, hide yo wife, becuz they rapin’ errybody up in here?”

from Pleated Jeans

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Japanese Mascots: A New, Effective and Charming Invasion

Could you just imagine if here in the US we used mascots to make the public more aware of issues relating to our safety? We already screwed up with Elvis as a Drug Czar (Thanks, naive Nixon), so which mascot would be our Drug Czar today?

They are all so loopy and quirky that you could say that all of them have symptoms of some sort of medical/recreational use.

Full article on Japanese mascots here: Japanese Mascots: A New, Effective and Charming Invasion.