Brainland’s Guide to Getting Reblogged
Now that I have followers, I no longer need to post real content, and instead can just sit here and prosthelytize, lazily suffocating in my own BO and nodding along to the latest remix of Rihanna’s much vivisected album, Good Girl Gone Bad, to drown out the noise of my getting fatter. BUT, instead I’ve decided to help you, gentle blogger, on the road to gaining multiple followers yourself. Here are some invaluable, tried-and-true tips to getting reblogged on tumblr. This is all assuming, of course, that you fit a certain standard of quirky, indie cool. Commence:
1. Photo With Words
One of the best ways to get people to reblog your shit is to post a photo with words in it. I don’t mean regular words, though, I mean thoughtful ones; ones that appear initially out of context but trick you into thinking the person who blogged the picture is soulful and elusive. So, like, an unremarkable picture of some mountains through a window on a train, with a sticker on the window that mumbles: “I think without you I’d wish I wasn’t anything,” or some fey shit like that.2. Bite the Cool
Since you’re not as cool as people who’ve come before you, bite: post a picture of someone very cool (like Lou Reed or Bowie). But unlike #1, it’s absolutely crucial there be no words. You see, the Cool Biting exists in the person (who reblogs) feeling residual cool from recognizing someone cooler by his/her face, not a label. It helps to get a picture that obscures the famous face slightly (like Debbie Harry, but in a hat) and, if you absolutely MUST label the photo, make sure you don’t call the celebrity by his “common” name, but birth name (Iggy Pop = James Newell Osterberg); that way you seem super informed.
3. Picture of a Room You Can’t Afford
This one’s easy. Find a tumblog about apartments, scroll down, randomly select a photo of the interior of an apartment (preferably in SoHO or the Upper West Side), try to get a shot that includes 1) an exposed brick wall, 2) a haphazardly arranged bookshelf and 3) wooden floors bathed impossibly in sunlight, and you are in business. Try to find one at an angle, though, so you look artsy and detail-oriented.4. Baby Animal
Anything. Fucking anything. As long as it shits itself and relies on adults for sustenance, your post is gonna be huge.
5. Quote From Someone in a Book You Haven’t Read
This one is a self-congratulatory classic. Simply take a book from a well-educated friend (anything French, German or in a language no longer spoken), open up to any page, pick a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, and blog. Don’t worry about explaining it or providing (god forbid) context, the less you say the smarter you seem. Another great way of accomplishing this is buying a book for smart people, getting three pages into the introduction, blogging from there and then never picking the book up again.
6. Warhol
People go fucking crazy for him.
7. The Nostalgia Play
This one trips up a lot of amateurs, because it seems easy. BUT, you can’t just post a youtube video of the opening from Eureka’s Castle, because that’s too obvious, and nobody likes the obvious guy (he’s inauthentic!). The trick to the Nostalgia Play is to find something that speaks to our generation’s un-fucking-flagging bittersweetness for their youth, but also appeals to more modern sensibilities about being cool/conspicuously educated. Basically, find a picture of the Snorks, only all dressed in black, like beatniks. The Simpsons are also a really great bet here, but, by themselves = no dice… while Lisa done up like a Lucian Freud painting = reblog heaven.
8. Skinny Girls in Various States of Undress
People are psyched on these.
9. Terrible Fucking Cover of a Song You Like
Got an ironic (maybe) harpsichord version of a Bruce Springsteen song? What about a spry, indie jug-band rendering of “Skulls” by the Misfits? Post, but DO NOT say the artist or song name, and instead pontificate timorously about the first time you heard a certain song, or about your earliest memory of watching MTV, or just the power of music in general… and let the kudos roll in.
10. Absurd Generalization About the Nature of Things
Many venerated blogs became famous for making extremely simplistic observations about life. So, take a random clause about, um, like psycho-sexual development (“Having a healthy relationship with your parents…”) and unite it with a seemingly unrelated and vague, meaningless clause about something within your periphery (“…makes you think that clouds are beautiful”). The more ponderous and abstruse, the better. I know it sounds stupid, but it works. Just a simple text post, or for the double whammy, combine with a photo from #1 and use as a caption.
…And whatever you do, don’t write huge, long-winded plain text posts. These are tumblr suicide and people are not down.
everyone, prepare to alienate.
