![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Writing a Link-Bait Crap Post
Mar. 25th, 2009 03:20 pm
-
Use Point Form
Most people can't or won't read with comprehension, they just skim headers and assume they already know what's going to be written below. If your crappy link-bait list is going to get Stumbled, Digged, or whatever, you need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and make them feel like they are clever. It's all about the "F" reading pattern that SEO snake-oil salesmen like to harp on. Remember that 99.83% of humanity has an I.Q. below the second standard deviation, it's only that remaining 0.27% (or 0.0027 if they work for Verizon) are geniuses capable of understanding prose and have the freakishly long attention spans to stay focused on something for more than a tenth of second.
-
Steal Your Content
Why waste valuable time thinking for yourself? Just assume that your audience has the attention span of a gnat and a memory like a sieve. They won't remember that they've seen the same list four hundred and twenty seven times before just so long as you change up the order a bit and use a different coloured background.
Here are a couple of great things to steal:
-
Do a Photoshop Tutorial
Make sure it is something completely inane that every freaking wanker calling themselves a "designer" now that they've managed to get their pirated copy of Photoshop working can get into, like how to use layers, handy keyboard shortcuts like "CTRL-SHIFT-Z", or pretty much anything else you can get straight out of the help file. Remember that your audience is functionally illiterate, so you are pretty much guaranteed that they won't have looked in the help file.
-
Present an Uncredited List of Photographs
Everyone likes pretty pictures, especially the drooling morons that read your crappy blog. Remembering once again that your audience can't or won't read makes writing any kind of credits for the photographers pointless anyway. Doing anything so intensely difficult as, say, linking to the photographers' websites is counter productive. Not only would it mean learning how to form an <a> tag, but it might mean people would leave your site by some means other than clicking on the fucking Google ads dominating your page in the upper left placement because you are so damn clever about exploiting that whole "F" pattern thing (never mind that it makes your first bullet point illegible, the content doesn't really matter anyway.) You can even pretend that you give a shit about the people you are exploiting by saying something like, "I found these pictures in various places around the Internet and don't know who they belong to. If you recognize something send me a note so I can credit the photographer." That's really brilliant, that way you look like the good guy and it's really your readers' fault for not knowing who you should credit.
Here's some popular things you can rip-off:
-
Weird Houses
Your lowest-common-denominator audience just loves laughing at creative freaks. Throw together some pictures of houses that have some character and your audience will feel better about the suburban monotony that surrounds them, and the ones from AOL will feel better about their trailers.
-
HDR Photographs
The sort of idiots that boggle at pressing three keys at the same time to get more than one level of undo out of Photoshop are really impressed with these. They're like magic. Especially if they are trailer-park ass-hAOLs and the pictures are of things they can't grasp, like buildings in Europe that are more than 20 years old.
-
Big Stuff
How about that picture everyone has seen a million times of that really big excavator crossing the highway? Or that bridge in France that crosses a valley? Or the strip mine in Siberia that sucks in helicopters? People love shit like that. One more time won't hurt. And enough people might click on your Google ads that you can treat yourself to a stick of gum.
-
Renderings of Product Concepts
If they have absolutely no chance of going to market because the concept relies on violating some fundamental law of nature, so much the better.
-
Cats
Because the Internet needs more pictures of cats. That's what it is there for. Especially "LOL Cats" - make sure you cover the classics: "I can has cheeseburger", "Drillcat will kill your family", "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate", etc. They never get old.
-
Stuff They Don't Have in America
Face it, if you are writing in English, even if your domain ends in .uk, .au, .nz, .ca or the two-letter country code of any civilised (with an "s") country, most of the drooling idiots that with look at it (I'd say "read" , but we know that is being too generous) are going to be from the good-ol' U.S. of A. Just run together a bunch of things that Americans have never seen in real life, like canals, advertising designed for people with more than two functional brain cells, small reliable cars that get good gas mileage, clean subways, buildings more than 20 years old, books, etc.
-
-
-
Don't Screen or Moderate Comments
Nothing makes an interesting post more interesting than the unfiltered insight of knuckle-draggers. Maybe start things out by trolling your own post with the requisite "photoshopped" comment. This is especially effective for posts of things that are necessarily photoshopped, like HDR photos or photo-manipulations. If you're really lucky the comment thread will degrade into a Republican vs. Democrat argument on American politics. Those are always fun.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
