In March, I made my second appearance at the Associated Collegiate Press Conference. This is the only conference I do for free. Any other conference? Well as they said in Goodfellas, “Fuck you, pay me.” I do the ACP events freely because it gives me a chance to interact with college students, which I’ve always enjoyed. For one thing, they don’t mind if you swear.

For another, I like interacting with them, and why I do it for free when I can, is because I’m a realist. I know that by the time the students see me, they’ve been bombarded by professors, the media, their peers, and others into thinking how great and wonderful social media and the Internet is in terms of promoting a product. But by getting to them before they graduate, I have this opportunity to try to show them that, while it’s not all bullshit, so much of what they’re hearing is. My hope is that I can bring a few of them over to my side of the table, and they’ll go and work for companies and organizations, or for themselves, and be better prepared than their peers for having done so.

The title of the presentation that I gave at the ACP conference in Los Angeles was “How To Be (Internet) Famous”. It’s a new presentation for me since I’ve been doing the “Social Media Is Bullshit” presentation for the past three years now. In that time, I’ve travelled around the world (so much so that I spent two solid years living out of hotels), had the presentation translated into numerous foreign languages as I went (everyone laughs in every language at the right moments, I’m proud to say), and I’ve had a lot of success.

But I noticed after each presentation that I kept getting the same question: “Ok smart ass, I get that it’s mostly bullshit, so now what do I do?” This would often lead to people asking me really specific questions about their project, which was fine, but when you have an audience of anywhere between two hundred and two-thousand people in attendance or watching online, it’s hard to give them an answer that would make them happy and also be informative to everyone else. And that’s sort of the rub: What works for one person won’t work for the next when it comes to marketing advice. That’s why so many marketing books suck.

So when I started putting together “How To Be Internet Famous” for the college kids in Los Angeles, I realized that although I couldn’t give specific advice to a specific student to address their specific product that they wanted to market, there is a general framework that any of them could follow in order to raise their probability of success. And let’s be clear, former WWE Champion and future UFC competitor, CM Punk, may tell you “luck is for losers”, but I’m not so certain. Call it luck, fate, whatever you want. The point is: On any given project you’re working on, there are factors you can’t control. Period. End of discussion. Therefore, nobody can guarantee your product’s success. Just ask Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals, who guaranteed victory in game seven against the New York Rangers only to have his team lose and be eliminated from the NHL playoffs. Ovechkin did all he could to help his cause, scoring the only goal for Washington in that game, but they still lost. Sure it’s a sport and there are millions of factors in play, but that’s exactly the point. You can’t guarantee anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sport or anything else in life. Instead what you can do is raise the probability of success by focusing on the factors you can control.

In giving the presentation in Los Angeles, I noticed people’s eyes starting to spin around in their head at trying to translate what I was suggesting toward their specific product. For the most part, people “got” what I was saying, but I think they would have been better served with something a bit more concrete so that they could see the framework I’m proposing in action. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I just so happen to have something I can use as that case study. It’s my comic, Liberty: The Second City Saint. This way I can take the comic and walk you, and future presentation audiences, through the framework I built, showing how each step would work in raising that probability of success.

Now, the eight page preview comic that currently exists for Liberty was not meant for the general public. You can read it and enjoy it, sure, but it was made for me to show editors at different comic book companies what I can do as a writer. So while I’m going to be using Liberty here as the example for the framework, it’s going to be a hypothetical example, for now. Whether or not it’s a real example is kind of irrelevant too, because people just need to see how what I’m proposing would be applied. It’s always easier to show someone what you’re saying instead of describing it. Also: The artist I’m using is awesome, but it takes about a month for me to get a completed page from him, so if I tried tying this column with the actual pace of making the full twenty page issue of Liberty, we’d be waiting  forever.

All that being said, here’s what we’re going to do: In the coming weeks, I’m going to walk you through the framework I’ve built that can dramatically raise the probability of you or your product’s success on the Internet. Hence the title, “How To Be (Internet) Famous”. For each step, I’ll use a hypothetical example involving Liberty, and show you how each idea and concept would be applied by me for promoting the comic. The upside to doing this as a column instead of a book is that it’s a bit more interactive too. So, if you have questions at any point, you can email me at bjm@boun.cr and I’ll answer them here.

For some more tips check out this article How to get Press and interview with SiliconANGLE’s own Kristen Nicole