---
title: "The nine tactics"
description: "Nine ways to exploit the incentives of blogs, each resting on a weakness in how online media earns money."
canonical: https://tomsharman.com/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/the-nine-tactics/
updated: 2026-11-03
---

# The nine tactics

> Nine ways to exploit the incentives of blogs, each resting on a weakness in how online media earns money.

Ryan Holiday's framework, from Trust Me, I'm Lying, pp. 18 to 125.

Framework 2 of 5 from [Trust Me, I'm Lying](https://tomsharman.com/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/index.md) by Ryan Holiday. Category: Offers and pricing.

## The steps

1. **Tactic 1: Bloggers are poor; help pay their bills.** Use free products, perks, access, ads and early support, because pageview pay makes every post a conflict of interest.
2. **Tactic 2: Tell them what they want to hear.** Give them pre-written material such as leaks, press releases, HARO answers and Wikipedia edits, since they have no time to verify.
3. **Tactic 3: Give them what spreads, not what is good.** Design the story around high-arousal emotion, with anger the strongest, because that is what gets shared.
4. **Tactic 4: Help them trick their readers.** Hand them a click-friendly question or mystery for the headline, and tee up a story that will draw comments.
5. **Tactic 5: Sell them something they can sell.** Supply a story that works as a one-off sale on its own, since blogs have to sell every article afresh like the yellow press.
6. **Tactic 6: Make it all about the headline.** Write or hint at the headline in your pitch and let the blogger take it.
7. **Tactic 7: Kill them with pageview kindness.** Show a story is a traffic draw, link it to a popular topic, buy a little traffic and leave fake comments to fill the silence.
8. **Tactic 8: Use the technology against itself.** Package material in the short, fresh, simple form the medium demands, and come to bloggers with the story already written.
9. **Tactic 9: Just make stuff up.** Offer an exclusive on a small or nonexistent story with an arbitrary deadline and let the blogger find the angle.

## Where it comes from

From chapter: Book One: Feeding The Monster: How Blogs Work, pp. 18–125

## The animation

24 seconds, 4:5, no sound.

- MP4: https://tomsharman-downloads-006143767029.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/downloads/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/the-nine-tactics.mp4
- MP4, dark: https://tomsharman-downloads-006143767029.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/downloads/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/the-nine-tactics-dark.mp4
- Still: https://tomsharman-downloads-006143767029.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/downloads/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/the-nine-tactics.png
- Still, dark: https://tomsharman-downloads-006143767029.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/downloads/bookshelf/trust-me-im-lying/the-nine-tactics-dark.png