A successful piece on ALLOD requires two very important things: A catchy headline and a featured image. They are your hooks. In order for the taters to click on your piece you have to elicit an emotional response. There’s no magic formula for “viral.” Viral happens when it happens, and there’s no stopping it. Some magical combination of the headline and image grabbed the audience and won’t let go. Solid, consistent numbers, on the other hand, are a bit more realistic to achieve, and this is where it all begins.
The number one mistake of guest submissions is humor. By far. I’m not sure what page people are reading, but ALLOD headlines are 100 percent clickbait nonsense that serves a single purpose: make the tater click. “Satire” doesn’t equal comedy. It doesn’t equal parody. It’s an art form that exposes people’s vices, and in this case, ignorance, in the context of contemporary politics and pop culture. Basically, it doesn’t matter what you think is funny, or clever, or something all of your friends would click. You’re not the audience. Without the audience, a post becomes 10 comments from the standard group of die-hards jumping on the two taters that were still dumb enough to comment.
So then…what works? If you go to the page, you’ll see exactly what works. Through the years, every writer has found their own little niche of characters they used to build their stories. My characters are battle-tested and come through for me time and time again. I prefer to stay away from straight politics. I don’t write about elected officials and I don’t try to work inside the realm of political news. First, there’s too much competition. Second, I don’t believe Facebook likes politics anymore. I have numbers to back that. Since January of 2021 (go figure) the mere mention of a Biden, a Trump, or any other active politician seems to kill a post. If Facebook frowns on something, avoid it. That’s a hard-learned lesson, I’ll tell you what.
So I stay on the outskirts and work with the supporting cast. The pundits. The talk show hosts. Celebrities who are vocal about politics on both sides. It’s a culture war and nothing else to them at this point. Fanning those flames is how you rope them in.
Pick Your People and Build Your Story
You can always do the South Park version of Family Guy writers picking topics, but we’re fresh out of manatees. Typically, I try to build stories around real events that I know the taters are jumping all over. Here’s a simple example: When Kid Rock shot up those beer cans, I immediately started spinning out headlines. Building them is easy enough if you follow some basic rules.
When something happens to make a person, place, or thing a target of their rage, punish that thing. I immediately had the entire marketing department at Anheuser Busch fired. Viral. I spent two weeks punishing Bud Light. The Oktoberfest ban got 250K page views. Their heroes? They get rewarded. Kid Rock made tens of millions for this whole thing.
Those are the basic rules. Punish what they hate and reward what they like. Rewarding Whoopi Goldberg with some kind of award goes nowhere, but taking one away goes viral. It really is that simple. Over the years we gave Freedom Medals to a dozen people hoping that would make them mad and they’d click. Newp. The only one that worked was Obama giving one to Epstein, and that was just…silly.
You can invent feuds between lefties and righties. Ted Nugent and Kid Rock crashed Alyssa Milano’s Golden Globes afterparty for 100K page views. Clint Eastwood telling her to grow up on Twitter (a thing Clint Eastwood has never been on) is one of my most consistent “evergreens.” You can also punish people they don’t like at random. I have Whoopi fired, suspended, or handed a pay cut at least once a month. The View has been sued by everyone. Twice.
That’s pretty much it. Once you’ve chosen your storyline it’s time to find a featured image. If you have a left versus right theme, your image should include both. The person on the left should be upset, angry, or emotional. The person on the right should be smiling, laughing, or grinning with approval. Whoopi Goldberg in a full smile because she just got fired wouldn’t make much sense.
Once you have your concept, title, and featured image, it’s time to build your piece. Getting them to the site is, of course, what is most important, but keeping them there for a bit is what makes it profitable. That will be the next post.