Serran: Working to Write News Stories That Go Viral

By Paul Serran

Disclaimer: This article will engage in discussion about metrics of viewership, and how to improve them. If you feel that’s nothing but clickbait, please skip this one.

Any writer worth their salt is looking to find an audience, to keep it and enlarge it. Whoever says the opposite is nothing but a poser.

But don’t worry – this is not a ‘how to’ article. In fact, I wouldn’t know how to write one on this subject. It’s also not about writing hit pieces to destroy the reputation or career of someone.

This is but an investigation about what we can learn from my present situation as a new writer on The Gateway Pundit, which helps illuminate the puzzle: how do you write a popular news piece that ‘goes viral’?

Since I joined this Information War in late 2017, I began to find an audience to write for in English.

To be honest, at first this sounded ridiculously impossible to my mind. But from the get-go, I had a sense of purpose that kept me strong.

I was ready and content to fail fighting the good fight, but then I did not. I found an audience, lost it to Globalist Overlords, but found it again.

What I encountered was a whole scene of like-minded people who didn’t mind me being Brazilian, to my grateful surprise.

In 2019 I started collaborating with the Frank Report, a blog run by Frank Parlato, the man who destroyed the NXIVM cult/scam. He is a serious guy with a very consequential blog.

Writing for Frank first showed me that the dream was achievable, that I could move from threads and short posts to articles and opinion pieces.

As a professional writer with published books, articles, short stories, and produced plays, teleplays, and scripts of every kind, I felt it was well within my reach – but until you start doing it, you never know.

So, having built a social media following, I started working towards the double goal of a) having a reasonably successful blog and b) writing for bigger news sites.

And boy, this year I got both things going.

If you search on the web, you will find that a post is considered ‘viral’ once it reaches 100k views. It’s actually not impossible to pull it off.

While I wrote this chronicle, I happened to hit one on Twitter. Look below, 155k and growing.

It’s a very simple post, in which I take advantage of my years in the Frank Report to show the tie of the Dalai Lama to cult/scam NXIVM and its criminally convicted leader Keith Raniere.

In Twitter, the strategy of saying the least possible about the implications of this situation proved the right move. I’ve noticed tons of leftist-minded people sharing it. If I had gone and made a manifesto about it, I’d be much more restricted in my reach.

When it comes to an article, it’s very different. You don’t just scroll about and bump into the post, you have to actively click on the link to read it.

It’s a much harder job to get a news piece or article go viral, even if you have 70k followers in different social media platforms, and promote your stuff relentlessly, like I do.

On my Paul Serran Substack blog,  my top viewership in a post was 16k. Very few articles topped 10k. Most articles get around 1.4k to 2k, and most of the best ones have 5k at best – 7k is almost miraculous.

Now, the Gateway Pundit is another story altogether. The news site gets millions of views per day. So, if I play my cards right, find a good story, present it well, and toil smartly at promoting it – a story ‘going viral’ with over 100k is feasible.

In my first fortnight at the GP, I wrote 10 articles and averaged a bit over 11k views on them – with my best article netting 24k. Nice, but I know this is just the beginning.

Now, in April, I’m writing faster and better, and have tweaked the promotional effort to work a little smarter. In the first ten days, the viewership increased quite a bit, with an average of around 15k per article, and a top article with 41k views – a result that’s 70% higher.

Not bad for ‘Mr. 1.5k views’, right?

In a conceptual way, it’s very easy, and we all know how to make a ‘hit’ news piece: you just pick up a relevant and engaging story, and you write it in a way that captures the public’s imagination.

Easy, right?

Of course, how we do that in practice remains a puzzle to me. There are tools to pierce the mystery, though.

Stats tell the story behind and beneath the stories. I’m crazy about stats.

I look at the stories I published, and the stats each one got, and a pattern soon emerges: some themes are cool, some are ignored. Some approaches get better results than others.

If you insist on what’s working and curtail what’s flopping, you should see progress.

I hope to see you guys around as this adventure unfolds.

First stop: a 100k story. Can I do it? How long will it take?

Stay tuned!

This article was originally posted on Paul Serran’s blog, read the original post here.

Paul Serran