Why I stopped trying to go viral

For about four years I made it a daily habit to keep up with my TikTok scrolling for “viral research,” to save the sounds I kept hearing over and over, find the videos that were doing well, and figure out how to put my own spin on them. If I jumped on a trend early it had a better chance of taking off. Chasing virality was the formula that was working for me, and reach was all I cared about back then, which I explain more in my recent post Is the Influencer Era Dead?. When I first started going viral I was posting twice a day on Tiktok, then it was once a day consistently, and I kept that up from 2020 until the middle of 2024. The first post that really took off was me sharing my story of being a young mom, and from there it was styling outfit transition videos, then the funny videos like me “acting like my Gen Z daughter”.

I gained so many followers from that stretch and for a while it felt like I’d cracked the ever elusive algorithm code. But the people who came in from those videos were there to be entertained. They’d comment “I followed you from the Gen Z video,” and I’d think well, that was one video, and most of what I post is nothing like it. They’d followed for the funny videos and were waiting for the next one, and if my next post didn’t also go viral, most of them were never going to see it anyway because of how the FYP was structured.

When a video did well I was happy that all the research, planning, filming, and editing felt worth it, and when one didn’t I’d get down on myself, like the hours I’d spent creating and editing were pointless because it didn’t get the views. I tied it back to the feeling when I would get an A on a research paper in college, that I did everything my professor was looking for and got rewarded with the grade. This was of course completely different but it felt like my performance was tied to views and creating for what I thought other people wanted to see and it left out the part of building a deeper connection with my audience. At that time, going viral was the thing that helped boost someones account and set them apart from other creators, got them ins with brand deals or shot up in fame that opened other doors, there were many how-to create viral video tutorials and many others were thinking there has to be some secret to this and if they could only crack the code. But I’m here to tell you, viral is a poor game plan. Sure, if you create something that was true to you and it resonates with many people, thats one thing but creating for the idea of going viral can be left in the past.

It took me awhile to get to this point, after years of trying to stay on the “viral train” it’s hard to get out of that mindset. The part that would keep popping up in my head was remembering why we started our blog in the first place. When I quit my job to pursue blogging full-time (more about that in this post) it was to have the time to work on it during the day and also to be there for Jadyn for after school pickup, and somewhere along the way and in those most recent four years I’d started to feel like a slave to the content and that this job was owning me. Anthony and I would have these conversations, this feels draining and pointless, if we’re only looking at it from the money side we could do something else to make money, it didn’t feel like I’m helping anyone. At the same time it’s also not that deep, it’s videos and photos. But I felt like it could feel more meaningful, especially with having to stay motivated to want to keep creating, I lost my why. I wrote about our move to Tennessee and the season that led up to it in these posts here so I won’t go through all of it, but that’s where the real change happened, when we stopped and asked ourselves how we wanted to live and how we could keep doing this at a pace we chose and why going viral is the last thing I want now…