As possibly the laziest guy on earth, who also wants to be rich and famous, the ultimate goal for me is to get “internet famous”.  To me, that means I have enough followers so I can make money off of all these suckers, but still be able to be pretty anonymous when I decide to venture to the great outdoors of a grocery store or mall.

I know I’m asking a lot, and I know whatever it takes to get internet famous would take a lot more work than I’m willing to do, but that is why I’m so bitter. I have high expectations and no desire to work for those expectations.

The more I learn about social media, the more I start to see that is how my goal could possibly be achieved.  The biggest and possibly fastest way to get more followers (other than being stupid good looking, a dashingly dynamic person or rich already) is to “get featured”. As soon as you make that status, your following will grow and you are more likely to get featured again.

If you don’t know what it means to “get featured”, most social media platforms feature certain people’s content as a way to inspire other people to scroll longer or get inspiration on ideas of what they can post to “get featured”.

It’s all about getting that one time featured thing. You see, for a small amount of time, that one little feature is shown to more and more people. They follow more, like more and all of a sudden you have more followers for a short time.

Then the snowball effect leads to even more followers, more noteriety and when you reach a certain amount of followers, fame. Then you are “Instagram famous”, “Tik Tok famous” or “Twitter famous” or you go viral. Virility leads to brand deals.

Brands start reaching out to you and give you free products or start paying you. Then you can start leveraging that fame to other platforms and all of a sudden you are pretending to like products on your social media and a small percentage of your followers who are called “suckers” buy your products and they give you more money.

The downsides are pretty hefty too but just ignore them. Getting featured is a little like an addictive drug of your choice. As soon as you come down from the high of getting featured, you have to have more or you start getting cranky.

My one brush with this fame happened back in the day on this very platform, WordPress. I was chugging along, doing my hilarious regular posts to a small group of people who appreciated my bitterness. One day I got an email from another Ben, but he was from WordPress.

He read one of my really crappy posts, and rather liked it. He told me that in a few days, my post would be featured on the Freshly Pressed page, which is the highest rank one blogger could receive at the time. Nowadays I think they call it Discover and it is nowhere near as fun to get the honor. Then like 6 months later, I got it again.

I was on the path to superstardumb. I had more followers, likes, and comments, but they didn’t last long. And somehow I didn’t get brand deals. Or free stuff. I guess a picture is worth a 1000 words, and people’s pictures were much more valuable than my bitter words.

Don’t worry though, I will continue to chase that lazy fame, while simultaneously, doing as little work to get there. That is my bitter, lazy promise to you.

What if any brushes with fame had you all had? Lemme know in the comments.

ARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH

Bitter Feature Me Ben