It’s Not Your Topic, It’s The Format

How I get over a thousand views every day using the HT list format

I came to Medium and used all my tricks. Almost every website I’ve written on I’ve become one of the site’s most popular writers in a matter of months.

There was no backup plan if my usual didn’t work.

On Medium it didn’t work.

Medium is different

For the first 5 months I tried throwing as much different shit at the wall in hopes something would stick. My views remained in the low teens for everything I wrote.

I was publishing around 50 stories every month. I use the word stories very loosely. Musings would be more accurate. Crap would more accurate still.

Self doubt and loathing entered my mind state. Maybe I wasn’t a good writer. I knew it would take time, but after this long I should be further ahead than the point I started from. Shouldn’t I?

I was blindsided by my first mild hit. It was a story about Star Wars. Okay, I can do Star Wars. But my later attempts at writing about Star Wars all fell flat. What was it about that story?

The difference in that story was how I presented the information and how I promoted it in the title.

I’ve always loved lists. The most, the least, the best, the worst. Love them all. Easy to digest without all the unnecessary explaining why you’re talking about this subject in the intro.

Other writers say not to write listicles

Yeah, they’re morons. Those writers that only write about writing don’t know shit about writing anything other than writing. Those fart boxes stories that write about not writing listicles write that story in list format half the time. They have no idea what they’re doing.

I listened to these Nicks at first and stayed away from the list format. Then I found the series Just Ranking Shit by LEVEL Editors. I loved it. He or she was doing exactly what other people said not to.

They got all kinds of crap in the comments, mostly for talking shit, but that meant they were getting reads. Writers are haters. They hate anyone doing better than them. Listicles do well if you write them right.

Cracked list formatting

Cracked.com was and I guess still is a humor site. Almost all of their stories are lists in the best/worst format. They start with a topic and rank the best worst of that topic in an entertaining manner.

They used a top six structure. Three on one page then the final three on the last. The problem was it was always six, and the examples they provided were always the same length.

The Cracked list was my outline, then I made it my own.

The HT list format

Using my story The Best Parody Movies of All Time And The Funniest Scene In Them as the example, this is what I do.

First I think of something I want to write about.

The 2010 sleeper Walk Hard is my favorite parody movie. I want to write about that.

50 views

If I write about a 10 year old box office flop it will get 50 views. Total. It doesn’t matter that I’m Hogan Torah. Nobody’s reading that.

I need to prop up my story with other movies. Top x parody movies. Where x = as many movies as it takes to get to between 1000 and 1500 words.

200 views

First thing I write is the title. I need the title to be as descriptive as possible. Let people know what it is they’re about to spend the next four minutes of their life reading.

The Best Parody Movies of All Time And The Funniest Scene In Them

Note that I don’t give the number. I don’t know why but they do better without the number. Besides I have no idea how many there’s going to be.

Doesn’t matter if I rank them in order or just pick a couple. I choose whatever makes for the best story, not the actual best. For this reason I advise against ranking. It’s more work. Though ranking your choices gets more comments.

500 views

How to present the choices? No reviews. Don’t write a synopsis unless everyone reading your story isn’t already familiar with what you’re listing.

For this story I decided to pick the funniest moment from each movie. I explain why I chose the scene, why I didn’t choose another scene, and express my appreciation for it.

1,000 views

Have you ever had a friend who tried explaining something funny that happened on TV? At the end they’re laughing hysterically and you don’t care.

That’s what you sound like when you try to explain a movie or TV show. The solution is embedding YouTube clips.

Show, don’t tell. Like a lazy junior high school teacher putting on a movie.

You don’t make money while they’re watching a video! I make almost 100 dollars a month without videos! — Assholes

Right. You don’t make money while the YouTube embedded video plays. You don’t make money when readers blow through your stories either. There’s 10 embedded videos in my top story last month. 3 out of my top 5 earners of all time use embedded videos from YouTube.

As far as the haters in my comments who don’t like my clips, I don’t read my comments. It doesn’t matter if they like them, it works.

Now the story has the potential to get 1,000’s of views and stay evergreen.

Here’s a few more tips:

You don’t have to write the equal amount for each item you list. Some you are going to have more to say about than others. That’s fine.

Check Google to make sure your idea hasn’t been done a thousand times. Enter your title into Google. If there’s already more than 5 things with the same idea written in the past three years, modify the list to be different.

It doesn’t just have to be best or worse. I like strange and bizarre media. Most of my regular format lists are the strangest or most bizarre. Other ideas would be ugliest, most unbelievable, most difficult, or if you can’t think of a category memorable works.

Think outside the box. For instance, my very popular Dumpster Fucking Behind The Taco Bell on the Edge of Los Angeles is actually a list. It’s four separate stories at the same location with the same characters. But it’s basically a list.

My most popular HT list format stories:

Stories that are actually lists that you might not notice are lists: