The One Amazing Formula That Will Revolutionize Your Posts

Hint: It’s clickbait.

If Seth Godin’s point in the IdeaVirus is that ideas that spread, win, is the counterfactual that ideas that don’t spread, fail?

I don’t remember the audio seminar on real estate where I heard this metaphor. It was about selling homes or doing real estate deals. How hard it will be to sell your home is baked into how you buy the property. It was something along the lines of “you could make any stone skip, it’s just a matter of how hard you have to throw it.”

The same goes for ideas.

Some ideas are more spreadable than others. For those other ideas, well, they need some force behind them. If a YouTube content farm is able to get views through manipulative means, is it winning? Does an idea need to be seen by more eyes to be successful, or does it matter more if it’s the right eyes?

I realize that I’m starting to write commentary on Godin’s writing but if you look at the binary winning or losing for an idea by spreadability, is it really about volume or impact? Does the audience matter?

I was watching ann reardon’s YouTube video Exposing 8 Viral Video Tricks That Will Blow Your Mind:

She brings up the formula that many clickbait-y videos follow in their titling convention:

[number] + [adjective] + [noun] + [promise]

It’s funny that our language and communication style is being affected by AI-driven systems. Starting off, we didn’t know what titles would drive more content, but YouTube revealed to us what worked and we doubled down on it. It’s the same with thumbnail images for posts.

We’ve already merged with the machine.

The telegraph influenced our writing style, same did QWERTY keyboards and our affinity towards certain words, but content-rewarding traffic algorithms do so with much more subtlety. Until content is tailored for the individual, we’ll probably see more formulas for writing come up that will make our writing style lazy.