Satire

How to Make Your First $1,000 by Exploiting Aspiring Writers

4 easy steps anyone can follow

(This is a guest post by Ralph Buttwig, a.k.a. Mr. Grow-a-Lot.)

Don’t be a f*cking idiot. If you’re on the Internet, the money isn’t in writing stories. It’s not in honing your craft and becoming a wordsmith.

The money is in exploiting the insecurities of aspiring writers. And believe me, those fools have more than enough — insecurities, not money (lol).

That means you don’t have to learn how to make a reader cry or laugh, how to change someone’s mind with words alone, how to research a topic, or how to provide some mythical “value.” And you most certainly don’t need any imagination, creativity, vision, talent, genius, or originality.

If you want to make some serious dough online, you need just one thing — some well-oiled fingers to reach into the pockets of wannabe writers. And today I’m going to share with you how to do just that in four simple steps.

Step 1. Pretend you’re successful

Trump pretended to be a successful businessman and how did that turn out for him? Well, it made him the goddamn president of the United States! So don’t think you need to have a hard work ethic or any innate qualities to make it online. What works in politics works just as well in the hustle world.

You see, the Universe is a six-sided die where all six sides spell “f*ck you.” It’s unfair. The rich get richer, the famous get even more famous, and the successful get even more successful. And that can be deeply disconcerting if you’re a nobody who wants to make some fabled passive income, but it shouldn’t be. In fact, this sad state of affairs reveals the real way to make money online. You get the success flywheel spinning by pretending to be the real deal — by pretending you’re successful already.

Thankfully, that’s quite easy. The vast majority of people aren’t aware of how real success looks like. They just look for superficial signs of success and when they see them, they conclude that the person in question must be successful.

So, just ask yourself: How does the average person know if I, Ralph Buttwig, am successful?

Well, just look at my profile as it was a year ago:

What do you see? A whimpering loser, that’s what you see!

I had no proof of popularity, wealth, or self-confidence. I had zero followers, zero selfies in front of expensive sh*t like sports cars and villas, and I wasn’t flexing with humble brags nor cocky brags. I was just some hapless baby deer others could take advantage of.

Thankfully, I found a way to remedy all that — a way to be on the top of the food chain. And you can too!

Fake your popularity

You don’t need to be popular to have a sh*t-ton of followers. Followers can be bought. So if you’ve got some dough you’re willing to blow, you can go to some of the shady corners of the web and buy a few thousand followers for a couple of bucks. Alternatively, just reach out to someone who has already gained some traction and buy their profile off them. There are markets for that, you know?

But what if you don’t have any money? What if you’re piss poor?

Well, don’t fret. Getting followers for free isn’t any harder. It just takes a bit more time. All you have to do is spend a couple of afternoons following anything and everything that pops up on your social media platform of choice. Better yet, find one of those “inspirational” platitude-sharing accounts with a large number of followers and follow each and every one of the idiots who follows them. A good fraction of these platitude-liking twits will follow you back and you’ll quickly amass more followers with this strategy than if you wasted your time producing anything of value.

Here, take a look at this. It’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile showcasing how many followers I gained by tapping “follow” on about 9 million accounts:

See that 2M? That’s two million followers! Pretty impressive, don’t ya think?

And once you have that critical mass of followers, things will start to take off on their own. You will gain new followers organically. Other people playing the sophisticated follow-for-follow game will stumble upon you and start following you as eagerly as if you were farting pheromone-infused AXE body spray. And so will any clueless users who are impressed by your big bulging follower count.

At this point you can stop clicking on every chump’s follow button. In fact, you should not only stop following people, but actively unfollow the millions you followed before. After all, for an account to look truly successful, the follower to following ratio needs to be as big as possible. In other words, unfollow pretty much everyone to hide the fact that you gamed the system.

Now, will you lose some of your followers if you do so? Sure. But who cares? Most suckers won’t even notice you unfollowed them and stay with you.

Here, look at how my profile looked like after my big unfollowing:

Notice, though, that I didn’t unfollow everyone. There are still some bigger accounts I want to suck up to and, besides, following zero accounts makes people suspect that something fishy is going on.

Now, having lots of followers is crucial, but you also need additional signs of popularity. You also need engagement. But don’t worry, that’s as easily faked as everything else. Just join some clapping and engagement groups (there are plenty on Facebook) and trade likes, public praise, testimonials, etc. Or, better yet, do what I did and ask your extended family to hype your regurgitated content:

This is called social proof and it’s essential to convince others that your crap is actually worth something. Remember, most people don’t know what’s good. So they look at others to determine whether they should like your sh*t or not.

Moreover, by manufacturing engagement on your posts, you’ll be pushing the right buttons on the recommender algorithms and so they will promote your content. Algorithms, after all, are stupid. They have no sense of quality. They only look at whether a post gets engagement — and that, lucky you, is all they do. Thus, your hype team’s engagement, together with the aforementioned social proof and massive following, will quickly make your stuff go viral.

Fake your wealth

Most people aren’t leaders. They are the exact opposite. They are insecure losers who need someone to look up to. So you need to come across as a big shot — a top dog or head honcho. And nothing conveys that more clearly than self-made wealth.

Now, before you stop reading in disappointment and crawl back into your trailer, hear me out. You don’t need actual wealth. You don’t need to own a Lambo to get a selfie in front of one. You don’t need a villa, gorgeous wife, expensive suit, and countless other signs of wealth either. Why? Because all these things can be rented for an afternoon without going broke.

In fact, you don’t even need to spend any money at all if you just keep your eyes open and walk around the right neighborhood. You can take lots of impressive selfies that will make anyone believe you make six figures:

And if you happen to live in a backwards poverty-stricken area of the country, just look into deepfake and face swapping software.

Here, look at this example of what you can do with a computer these days:

Yes, that’s Sylvester Stallone’s face on Macaulay Culkin’s body. So take a few scenes from The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street, or any of the other movies in which Leo DiCaprio plays a rich prick, and swap his face with yours. No one will be the wiser.

Fake your self-confidence

Besides wealth, what else tells the losers out there that you’re worth listening to? Well, self-confidence, of course!

Now, some people have this silly notion that you actually need to have accomplished something in order to brag. But you know what? You don’t. You can just lie.

Here, let me show you:

I made $3,000 last month from blogging alone.

Here’s another one:

I have a thriving ghostwriting side-hustle.

And another one:

I have a newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers.

See how easy that was?

Make sure to add some of that BS to your social media bios. And while you’re at it, change your name and location to something a little more respectable, like I did:

Step 2. Make false promises

Once you smell like success, it’s time to tell the suckers out there what they wanna hear — that they can be successful too. Again, it’s very easy. Just lie.

Tell them they can be rich. Tell them they can be popular. Tell them they can be happy. Tell them they can go viral. Tell them they can achieve all that without working hard. Heck, tell them they can make six figures while sipping Mai Tais on a tropical beach and getting blown. Remember, if a sucker wants to hear it, they won’t doubt it. And, luckily, lots and lots of dimwits out there want to hear the most ridiculous horsesh*t.

Oh, and don’t forget to add dollar signs and big numbers to your headlines, as well as plenty of power words and phrases like “brutal truth,” “hard lessons,” “unbelievable,” “ridiculously useful,” “convert like crazy,” “powerful insights,” “brilliant,” “jaw-dropping,” “life-changing,” etc. Spicing it up with these trite phrases never fails.

Step 3. Profit off desperation and envy

Once you have faked your popularity and wealth, and have made your audience eager to throw their hard-earned cash at you to make their dreams come true, it’s time to profit off their desperation and envy. In other words, it’s time to sell.

But what do you sell them?

Duh! You sell them something they think will make your promises come true, of course! You sell them the secret to your success.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “I have no secret. My success is totally made up.”

Well, yeah, sure it is. But don’t worry about that. You and I both know there is no secret. But the suckers out there don’t. In fact, they are so desperate to believe in a secret that all you have to do is repackage information that is freely available, slap a hyperbolic title on it, pretend it contains “the secret,” and sell it for a ridiculous price.

Note that the last part is important. The product you sell needs to be expensive. Don’t make the mistake of selling your “secret” for just $10. This is for two reasons:

1. You want to cheat your “students” out of as much money as possible.
2. You want to make your students feel cognitive dissonance.

In case you don’t know what cognitive dissonance is, it’s the mental discomfort a person feels if they have two conflicting beliefs in their head. And what does that have to do with the pricing of your product?

Well, easy. No one wants to believe they’ve been scammed. And the more money they paid, the less they want to believe it. So by pricing your product high enough, they’ll have such a mental discomfort that they’ll feel as if you had cracked open their skull and taken a dump in it. They’ll know on the one hand that they just spend a sh*t-ton of money on some useless information while at the same time wanting to cling to the idea that they are not a sucker.

So, how is their mind going to resolve this monumental cognitive dissonance? Well, they’re going to rationalize their purchase and convince themselves that it was valuable after all!

But they’ll only do that if they wasted enough money to make it painful to admit it was a waste. So an expensive product is key for your victims to rationalize their purchase. What’s more, if you make your crap expensive enough, they’ll rationalize it so hard that some of them will even become fan boys! They will be recruiting new suckers for you (LMFAO!).

Finally, just to hedge your bets, make sure to mention something like having to “believe in oneself,” “being consistent,” or “never giving up.” That’s for one simple reason: it allows you to blame the victim.

If one of the dimwits starts doubting you and begins to suspect your advice is useless, just tell them it’s their own fault that the advice didn’t work: “Not seeing any results? Well, that’s on you! If you had just believed in yourself, had been more consistent, or had not given up, you would have made it by now.” Genius, isn’t it? xD

Step 4. Iterate

Once you’re selling, you’ll start making money. So your success stops being entirely made up and becomes real — at least in the sense that money starts flowing into your pockets.

So, what do you do now? Well, you iterate. Whenever you reach a milestone through your fakery, you use that to reach the next milestone.

Reached 10K followers? Make some sh*t up on how you reached those 10K and promise others they can reach that number too. The desperate won’t be able to resist clicking on your BS, algorithms will promote it, and you’ll be well on your way to 15K. Rinse and repeat.

Ditto if one of your pieces goes viral. Write a follow-up piece where you spew some sh*t about believing in yourself, how everyone can do it, yada yada, and that way you go viral again. Rinse and repeat once more.

And you do the same if one of your idiot students gets lucky and makes money themselves. You take credit for the luck and use it as proof that your advice works. That will bring in another wave of suckers, a tiny minority of which will see some success too due to sheer luck, which you then use to bring in the next wave. Rinse and repeat yet again.

It works like motherf*cking gangbusters!

Here, I’m going to make it super easy for you and give you the whole moneymaking machine in a nutshell:

1. Manufacture credibility.
2. Tell writers they can make a sh*t-ton of money.
3. But they need to buy your “secret” to get that money.
4. A tiny minority of suckers really will make money due to unfathomable reasons. Take credit for that success and use it to sell your “secret” to even more suckers.

That, my fellow douche, is the real secret. But keep this one hidden. We don’t want the hordes of aspiring writers to wise up, do we?

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