Stop Trying To Go Viral And Start Focusing On Adding Value

Ken Reid
4 min readMay 3, 2021
Photo by Aaron Weiss on Unsplash

Each morning at 6:30am, I click publish.

This is the one,” my brain tells me. “This one’s going viral.”

I don’t allow myself to look at stats for at least two hours. After all, it’s going to take some time to gain traction.

Finally, around 10am, I take a peak.

“12 reads? There’s no way! That was my best one.”

I tend to think I have a good gauge for what people want to read; that I understand the masses, even though I have no evidence to back my belief. When it doesn’t work, I respond the same two ways every time.

First, I sulk.

“Clearly I just don’t get it. I don’t have a clue what people want to read. I should just stop. There’s no point in continuing if I can’t figure out how to get even one post to blow up.”

Writing this out loud, I get how ridiculous it sounds. But in my head it always seems to make sense.

Second, I dig.

When my pity party is over and the clean up crew has arrived, my brain goes back to strategy mode.

There’s gotta be a way. It’s gotta be my title. I need to practice writing killer headlines.”

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Ken Reid
Ken Reid

Written by Ken Reid

Marketing Director & Storyteller | I’m not a dreamer, my brain just vacations in the future.

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