Creating Fake News/Link bait?

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Do you guys have any tips for creating this type of content from scratch?

In the past I've used buzzsumo, take a semi related article and then changed a few words and kept the structure. Want to create something more original.

Any tips/advice?
 
Have had satirical stories picked up by some of the world's biggest and prestigious media outlets. It really opened my eyes to the media, and honestly it was disappointing.

We all know the TMZ's and the HuffPo's are basically candy and junk food, but when you've got the BBC and Vice running stories that are completely false, without doing any fact checking what so ever, because they're all racing to get it up as quickly as Johnny's Clickbait Blogspot, I just sat there like "Damn, these are the end times."

You need a story that these "journalists" can't resist reporting on. It has to be crazy enough that they know they'll pull in huge traffic with it, but not so crazy that they don't believe it. So it has to be feasible. You need to straddle the line between "There's absolutely no fucking way that's true..." and "Holy SHIT, I can't BELIEVE this is really happening!" Give them all of the information they need to do a story on your news, because you absolutely don't want anyone to start digging.

BUT people will dig. A previous hoax worked because anytime someone would comment "Is this for real?" someone else would reply "Yeah, I googled the guy's name, there's like 10,000 results for it and all of these big sites wrote about it..." So if you plan ahead, and drop some breadcrumbs around the net, that'll help a lot. For example a recent hoax mentioned a CEO, so beforehand I wrote some "Top 5 CEO..." type articles and scattered them around, so that when people would Google his very unique name, they would find references to the guy.

Find a topic that is related to a niche that you can reach an audience in, but that also has that broad appeal that people who aren't into the niche will still care about. You use your exposure within the niche to get traction, and the mass appeal of the story is what makes it explode.

You need to push buttons on people, it's the same as getting them to share any other article, except this time you're the first source for the story. Keep an eye in the serps for keywords relating to your hoax, and hit up any sites that don't include a link and ask them to link to you.

Getting high up on reddit might be enough to catch the attention of the media, or you might want to hit them up directly with a news tip. There are so many writers and editors out there curating social media and reddit for story ideas because it's way easier for a journalist to write about some online trend versus putting on their boots and going out and doing actual journalism. Why would they waste their time writing about a local flood when they can write about your insane hoax that'll get a million times more page views?

They're like hungry little parasites, so feed them.
 
If you haven't already read Ryan Holiday's "Trust Me I'm Lying", then you should consider picking up a copy. I enjoyed it a lot and the book may give you a few ideas.

My experience with hoax news is mostly limited to April Fools Day stuff - which were successful - but I generally do not like outright fake news spam.

Although, having said that, I recently decided to do one of my own in a couple months. :smile:
Not spam and not for profit - just for laffs.

Dropping crumbs around the net in advance, as James suggests, will help convince most people who decide to investigate your story's authenticity.
 
Creating fake news seems like a lot of work when you can use something like BuzzSumo to find real stories that are crazy enough and haven't made their rounds lately. Reddit has a sub called /r/nottheonion which is perfect for these "so crazy they don't seem real" stories. Plus there's always the possibility of blow back if you aren't framing it as a joke or satire.
 
Thanks for the replies guys, got some good ideas. Going to go back to buzzsumo as well and stop trying to complicate the process
 
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The best orginal "Why do things go viral?" book I read is this: http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287

It really goes over the concepts of what makes some stuff just spread vs others that die. The concept of "going viral" isn't new at all. In the recent past viral stories were called "urban legends/myths" and spread for similar reasons.

Beyond that it's just an exercise in creativity and practice.
 
before the dawn of the interne viral marketing was called "mouth to ear marketing" viral does sound better though.
 
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