I’m not the best at marketing, but I still have had occasional successes - the gnome photoset which landed #11 top of reddit of all time for a few years, various miming stuff, earning 100k/month on OF during a brief summer of intense obsession. I also keep accidentally going viral anyway, even if I’m not trying, like for the shower thing or the eating poop thing or the not-that-pretty thing or the birthday gangbang or the big kink survey or doing acid every week for ten months or bestiality tweets or slutcon or whatever. My main twitter account is only my third-most-followed social media account; all my social media accounts together net about 1.5 million followers.
So my friends sometimes ask me for marketing advice. I feel weird giving it - there’s tons of marketing advice online already, given by confident, well-lit people directing you to their course or whatever. The market is saturated. Everyone’s trying to tell you how to make it big, and a lot of them have actually great advice.
But still, maybe I’m doing something unusual. I think most people giving marketing advice are Serious Adults, while I’m not. Most of my success isn’t a result of hard work. I score like, 5th percentile conscientiousness, if ADHD is a real thing I probably have it, and I have to install a ton of workarounds in my life in order to do basic stuff like keeping my house clean. I alternate between playing videogames for weeks straight and then occasional extended weekends of intense, hyper-effective 16-hour workdays.
So when I look at most People Who Do Marketing Real Good, I admire it, but I don’t feel like I have a lot in common with them.
For example: Substack staff told me that my blog has toyed with setting Substack-wide records for stuff like growth and conversions from individual posts, and that this is very weird. They said they rarely see someone get successful the way I have, that their best writers get popular by consistent, good-quality output, not by my strategy of two insane posts a month.
So this is where I’m coming from. I’m doing very well, but sort of accidentally. I’m sloppy, irresponsible, but occasionally shit out effective attention babies into the world.
So this guide is how to do unhinged marketing - not about putting out consistent content, not about boring but sensible stuff like maintaining a consistent brand and asking people to like and subscribe. This is a guide to one day waking up at 11:30am in a bed after a 3-week factorio binge, covered in dorito crumbs, yet finding somehow your limbs are inhabited by the spirit of the lord, which puppets you over to your desk and you watch yourself type something that’ll end up on knowyourmeme.
This is probably the biggest one.
It’s obvious when you really want something, but tiny desires are quick. Some examples of tiny desire:
If you sit down to watch a crowd, how do your eyes decide where to look? Who do you linger on? This isn’t necessarily about attraction - are there any faces, fashions, that catch you?
When you scroll down a youtube or netflix thumbnail screen, pay attention to your own gaze. Do you ever look for an extra few seconds at a thumbnail you have no intention of clicking on?
When you’re talking with a friend, why do you choose to say what you say? What do you want out of the conversation? Just small little comments, miniature jokes, any time you steer the topic - they come out of subtle itches, desires to feel a certain way.
How can you grab the attention of others if you don’t understand your own attention? Try to make it explicit - if your eyes stare at a person longer than normal, consciously verbalize that to yourself. Think the words, “I notice I want to look at that person.”
Often we fail to notice our own attention if its behavior doesn’t make sense to us, or doesn’t line up with things we want to be. If you’re insecure about being too feminine, you might not notice that you stare longer at the Barbie movie poster than at others. If you’ve seen a million paintings of flowers and find them boring, you might dismiss yourself when you pause in front of a painting of flowers in a thrift store, because you subconsciously expected yourself to be bored. Committing to active attention practice can help you start to notice when this is happening.
A great way to do attention practice is to watch ads. Ads are incentivized to be attention-grabbing, but there’s so many of them and they’re annoying that you probably are primed to hate them. This is perfect. Sit down and watch some ads, and meditate closely on your own experience as you do so. How do you emotionally respond to the color schemes? Do you like looking at the faces of the actors? Does your heart twinge in response to a tearjerker ad for disneyland? These are all important. Don’t let yourself get in the way of it.
Even if you think you don’t want something, you might still want to look at the thing you dislike. Our desires encompass aversive things all the time. We often gain a lot out of paying attention to something that feels bad.
You might think you are a machine built to quickly process the world into ‘want’ vs ‘do not want’, but I like to think of the dichotomy more like ‘want’ vs ‘bored’. You either look, or you are bored. You either move towards, or you are bored. You either think something is gross and bad, or you are bored.
If you think in want vs do not want, you may fail to class aversive stimuli as useful. You might want to kiss a beautiful woman and thus look at her longer; you might think an old man is ugly, and stare at him in disgust; but the heart of marketing comes from noticing that you want to look at both of them. Neither of them are boring.
The default world is hard to see. It comes with implicit rules like “Nobody uses political messages to sell razors” or “use the platform you’re on to grow your platform.” Since a huge part of marketing is noticing what everyone else hasn’t thought of yet, you really have to deconstruct the walls around your thinking.
Thus, notice your attention, not just the things you like. “What you like” is shaped by society around you, it picks out what fashion is good and what opinions are fashionable. But your attention is truer, more innocent, and can often be a guiding star.
For example: when I was a camgirl a decade ago, everyone competed via the camgirl platform. The platform ranked and promoted girls, and everyone’s attention was on competing within the platform. But I noticed that my attention was also on reddit, as a user. Reddit was bright and fun and shiny, and was compulsed to look. Probably other people felt the same way too - maybe if I posted my nudes there, other people would see it? This ended up becoming wildly successful.
This might seem an obvious move in hindsight, but at the time it was not obvious. People weren’t just following how attention flowed, they were following norms for behavior. We wanted to get ranked high on the platform; this desire shut out the ability to notice other avenues of attention.
So: you’re not here to notice what feels good, what satisfies your deepest cravings - you’re here to notice everything you pay attention to. Discard everything else.
A lot of my friends really hate ads. They view them as deceptive, or manipulative. Sometimes this is true, but usually I view them with gratitude - ads are selling a story, and this is good. Stories are meaning! It’s what it means to be human!
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about how people deal with suffering. He recounts an older woman who was in a lot of grief over her dead husband. The frame that ended up giving her some peace was this: Either she or her husband was going to have to die first, and by her husband dying first, she’d spared him the grief of having to endure her death. In this, her suffering had purpose, and was meaningful. “Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.”
No facts about her life changed, she did not have misconceptions corrected. Rather, the thing that gave her peace was a story that ascribed meaning. It’s in everything! Attractive fuckbois tell women a story that their penis is a bestower of value. Cute frilly dresses tell a story of innocence, vibrance, and desirability. Making men take out the trash comes from a big cultural story about gender roles, where violating it is just cause for offense.
I like stories. I like going into a fancy clothing store where they have little glasses of champagne and flattering lighting and cushy chairs, where for a moment I feel like a princess, and like all of the clothes they sell make me a princess by proxy. I like the ritualistic effort people pour into making you feel the magic of Narrative. I’m happy to purchase the sensation of narrative, I consider this as much of commerce as physical goods.
Your relationship to the process of selling your product should be one where the process itself is beneficial to people. You should, ideally, enjoy crafting stories that help grant other people meaning in their lives. Many people shy from this out of fear of being dishonest, but I don’t think honesty and magic are incompatible. You can speak the truth with words of beauty! You can weave together threads of purpose or identity without ever causing people to make worse predictions about the world.
I recently attended a normie conference for the first time in my life and was horrified. The way they presented the information was slow, everybody for some reason sat down for a three hour keynote speaker that just went literally through powerpoints they easily could have viewed online. I felt like somehow we’d all been brainwashed to agree to do this. I was so so bored.
I think everyone else was bored too, but I’m not sure they would have noticed. Maybe in their world, brute forcing boredom is a virtue - you are being a good person by spending your attention on Hard To Attend To things, you are laboring in the focus mines.
But no! I reject! Laziness is a shining beacon that guides you into effortlessness!
In marketing, your boredom itself is a virtue, one that you have constantly been trained to squash. If you are writing a blog post and discover your attention is wandering, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. If you are trying to explain a concept and the life drains out of you and it feels like you are trudging through mud, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. It’s an important signal!! If your attention fades off of it, probably others’ will too. The secret to magic attention is that it occurs effortlessly; as soon as there is effort (in the creative process itself), this is a sign that you are wandering off the path.
Remember being a kid, sitting in waiting rooms for your parents to do something important, and you started testing out the things you could throw that weren’t meant to be thrown, or the new shapes a chair made when you put it on its side, or the biggest splinter you could peel off from the floorboards? If you find yourself in the waiting room of creativity (which is hard to notice and you should be on constant paranoid lookout for), do not continue to wait. Roll to the side and see what new thing you can piece together with your attention.
In many of my blog posts, you’ll find sections where I have unnecessarily “visceral langauge” (as the AIs describe me) in the middle of something kinda dry like discussing confounders in a graph. Usually this is a symptom of me rolling to the side; it’s some subtle automated process where a part of me is just diving away from boredom at all costs. FUCK off, boredom. I’ll fuck you in the throat. I’m trying to entertain myself in writing this damn thing. The experience itself should be playful, not effortful, and for me this manifests in crazy language sometimes.
Often following through with a thing can be boring - if you’ve painted a picture but now you just have to trim the edges, sure. You might wanna kill yourself and there is a correct and good place to force yourself through your suicidal urges anyway. But that is no longer creative work, just surgical work, so you’re good.
How can you understand other people’s attention if you don’t understand your own? Actually it’s just about understanding your own, and hoping other people match it.
(i wrote the above in an earlier draft and it sounds cool but i kinda forgot what it meant.)
You’re selling a self image. Egophoria feels sparkly and people want it. Grant people the gift of identity, the ability to position themself a certain way.
(writer’s note: I’M BORED OH GOD. What am i actually trying to say here? What do I care about?)
I want to link you to this thing. I talk a lot about seduction as narrative reinforcement there, like this aspect in relation to sex.
But often I think people mistake people’s interest for interest in the thing itself, when really it’s disguised interest in what the thing says about them. I think often people spend insane amounts of money to hire me as an escort not because I have the biggest tits of them all (despite them being rather large) but because being high priced means I’m a symbol of success, and buying me is hard proof you are successful.
But this is everywhere, and subtle, and I’m gonna say it again but noticing egophoria in yourself is vital to understanding it in others. Feeling angry and righteous about things generates egophoria, because it swells up your sense of BEING, like a drowned body bloated with swamp water. (Despite the metaphor I don’t think egophoria is inherently negative. I just like metaphors)
Do not say here is a razor, but rather say here is a manly razor for muscular men. If you are very fancy and sophisticated, you can hide little egophoria prizes. My birthday gangbang post went extra-viral for many reasons, but the dry statistical presentation next to the extreme sex content was funny, and there’s a little bit of egophoria in being the kind of person who can notice contrast like that. I don’t even know if jokes are funny or if it’s that being the kind of person who can get a clever joke feels friggin awesome.
Once you make the thing, close it, imagine being someone else, and then open it again and look at the whole thing. It is very simple and very stupid but you have to try it really hard. It can help to have another friend look at your thing, and then as they’re looking at it, look at it yourself simultaneously and imagine being that friend. Often when I write a thing I will give it to someone to critique, and then read it through as the other person does, trying to inhabit it in their mind. You must expand past yourself.
I am successful but I haven’t been able to predict it! From my perspective I make a whole lot of stuff, and a random 1.5% of it goes viral for reasons mostly beyond my understanding.
You probably will not be able to predict what goes viral. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It’s much better to instead just put out everything in high volume, and then notice which of those things does better, and then gradually shift your attention to things more similar to those. You must grow towards the light like a tree; put out many branches, feel out what gets more rewards, and then pump more energy into those leaves. You cannot plan something super complex in advance. You must release yourself into the winds and let your process emerge slowly, in constant conversation with your environment.
Thus you must be in contact with your environment. You need to constantly be getting feedback about your work at any scale you can handle. Show your friends, publish the writings or videos even if nobody reads them. You won’t be able to grow towards the light if you’ve kept yoruself shielded.
Really, doing good marketing is more of a process, a way of being, a way of attending to yourself, a way of staying in tune with others, a way of surrender.
You should at least try a scary thing now and then. It’s okay if your whole business isn’t meant to be edgy, but people are so much more inclined to imagine the terrible things that could go wrong, while simultaneously being incapable of imagining all the wonderful things that could go right.
You need to be ready to fail. If some percentage of what you’re doing is not failing harder than you see the people around you failing, then you probably will not succeed harder than the people around you are succeeding. You are not being brave enough.
The entire thing that will allow you to detect your own attention where everyone else doesn’t, is bravery. Being able to act on unusual perspectives is bravery. Rolling around in the waiting room to see what the thing on the floor tastes like, is bravery. You will be entirely mediocre if you spend your time doing the thing that everybody else is doing. You need to be a little scared. One thing almost all of my most famous moments has in common is that I was actively scared when posting them.
Hard to cast magic spells if you don’t love it. Hard to do anything with delight if you’re working against yourself the whole time. Maybe this is why most marketing advice is stuff about following clicks and algorithms - it’s the sort of thing that works if you are not in love with your own creations.
This is ancient advice but worth repeating - direct is better than indirect. When in doubt, just say the thing. If your creativity is stagnant, just say the thing.
There’s an exercise you can do where you pick a sentence stem, like “I’m afraid of ___” and you are supposed to just repeat it over and over, filling in literally anything into the blank. I’m-afraid-of-cows-I’m-afraid-of-poop-I’m-afraid-of-writing-too-fast-I’m-afraid-of-eating-boogers etc.
The goal with this exercise is to get very used to saying things that don’t resonate, and then notice when things do resonate. When I typed writing-too-fast I felt a tiny part of me vibrate a little. It wasn’t true, I don’t mind writing fast, but it started broaching into some skill and identity part of me that I care about (writing). If I kept going I might get into things that made me vibrate more. That tiny, subtle little vibration is the signal, and you should practice noticing when it happens.
Just Saying The Thing is the skill of letting your insides settle until they are clear, looking in with a piercing gaze, and spearing the True Words. What is the actual thing? You’re faffing around something - what is the thing you’re faffing around? If you were to let yourself fall to the floor in utter surrender, and if God were to reach inside you and wrench from you the truth, if the words that spilled from you were pure holy worship stripped of doubt - what would those words be?
The best marketing is when the marketing itself is joyful, and improves someone’s life even if they don’t follow through to the thing. Your marketing should, whenever possible, be a standalone product. It should be something that benefits people in itself; it should be a gift. My viral mime video was originally intended to direct people to my onlyfans, but it’s satisfying to watch in itself! You wouldn’t even know it was meant as an ad.
I’ve met a surprising amount of people who seem actually afraid of making money, on some level. Sure, they’ll say they want money - but sometimes having more money than your peers, especially if your peers have a negative view on wealth, will drop your status. In a world like that, your entire being will subtly be warping away from ways attention on you might convert to money. You will be less likely to notice opportunities for money-flavored attention, and there will be a whole dark spot on one side of the waiting room floor your psyche will not allow you to roll into.
Man I hate summaries. The problem is as soon as I finish saying the things I am now bored of what I have said, and trying to finish them feels like work. What fucking takeaways am I supposed to summarize? It’s your job to get takeaways from this! I already wrote the thing! Hurr dee durr “ah yes and now I have made some points about thinking like a good marketer and getting inhabited by the voice of god. Now you should do that if you want to, it might help you” like those words were not already extremely obvious. I can’t tell if the whole summary tradition at the end of essays is a scam or not. I make more money writing than the english teachers who taught you to put summaries at the end of the essays so maybe I’m the captain now.
p.s.
I need to take my own advice more. I’m too afraid of this blog now. I get ~80k readers roughly per post, with high variance. That’s too many readers. I imagine all of you in a stadium and my hands start sweating. maybe i should release a post made out of entirely misspelled words. Maybe i should let an eight-year-old write my next post. maybe i’ll post a photo of my somewhat large boobs and then turn this blog into ‘battle with stripe payment processor regulations’. One post I keep trying and failing to write is about how people are on a spectrum from low to high status sensitivity, in the same way people are asexual or very horndog-esque. My partner is low status sensitive, for example, while I’m high. I think my high sensitivity makes me spend a lot of brain cycles on trying to model what other people think of me. I handle it a lot better than i used to, come up with coping mechanisms like BEING SUCCESSFUL noticing it gently and moving on. I often imagine how much more people would like me and think i’m awesome if only i were the kind of person who didn’t care that much if people liked me and thought i was awesome. I don’t mind too much on some meta level, cause idk I just got wired like this. Some do, some don’t. And plus egophoria is a pretty fun sensation. I kinda like the struggle.
It’s just, you know how people have core wounds or whatever, like some deep fear? mine is something like “nobody wants to listen to me.” On some deep level, some old part of my brain really believes that, and it leads to things like being really quiet in social settings. It’s driven me to being Very Online, because the thing I love about text conversations and writing is that it’s all consent based. People don’t have to read my writing in the same way they have to listen to me if I’m in the room talking, so if they are reading what I write, I feel assured they actually want to do it. I feel a constant sense of apology when I talk in person, like I am using up valuable Time and Attention that is costly and maybe i should be paying other people for the trouble. I’m wired to be so low status lmfao.
But still, yall subscribed and this goes into your email inboxes or whatever so the pressure is returning even here, like oh shit i gotta put on a suit and make this Good, or something. But it’s so weird for your job to be say things real Good to people. On one hand it’s a dream job, I love love love being paid for thinking. On the other hand it sorta feels like sex work, where even if I’m not horny I gotta go masturbate now. Masturbation feels good don’t get me wrong! I like it! But you still kinda have to do it. Probably no way to get around that, though. It is a fact of life. But figuring out how to let joy and delight and the voice of god flow through me each week on a regular schedule is crazy. Probably real creatives have figured this whole thing out a long time ago but I am just getting around to it.