 In 2010, I wrote a blog post about a career change I had made, from micro biologist at a research university to biology teacher at a public high school. Almost three years later, the post went viral. As of today, the post has 457,000 Facebook likes, 1,000 comments, and it dwarfs every other piece of content on my blog, clocking in at over 1.2 million views now. And I swear, only about 100,000 of those views are from me reloading the page to check my stats. Anyway, it was an exhilarating experience, but also extremely stressful because of what happened subsequently. So today, I'd like to share the four main lessons I learned when my blog post went viral. Poaching rows, going ad mad, poaching plagiarists, and republished regrets. So here's a graph of my traffic, my page views from August 2013 through December 2013. And notice that in November is when my traffic started surging, but also noticed that it leveled off and even dipped for several days. And the reason this happened is because of something called site throttling. And basically throttling means that if you get a spike in traffic, your host can significantly limit the number of connections that can be made to your site at any given time. Literally, they throttled access to my blog. And at its worst, it would take over a minute to load one single page. But the most frustrating part of this was that I was in contact with support at my host for over a week before I was finally told what was going on. At first, they told me that it was my WordPress install. They blamed it on my plug-ins. They basically did everything but admit that the slowness of my site was being done intentionally on their end. So it wasn't until the fourth support person I talked to that I finally heard the term throttling for the very first time. And at that point, I realized that I had to upgrade to a more expensive non-throttling plan. So that's the first lesson. Be aware of throttling and be ready to upgrade if necessary. When my post first started going viral, I gleefully checked my AdSense account. And I noticed that my blog had gone from making about $20 a month to over $100 in a single day. So I was pretty excited. And then on the third day of the surge, I noticed that my ads had mysteriously disappeared. And then a couple hours later, I got this email from AdSense. After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, this is how I found out that my AdSense account had been suspended. Naturally, I filed an appeal. In fact, I filed several appeals over the next four months because that's how long it took for them to reply. So finally, after four months, I get this. Thank you for clarifying your situation, we've reviewed your circumstances and have reinstated your account effective immediately. Woo-hoo, right? I log into my AdSense account and all the money is gone, including $75 that I had in there from before my post even went viral. I never got any of it back. And judging by the amount of traffic that I had during those four months when my account was in limbo, I estimate that I missed out on probably several thousand dollars' worth of ad revenue. And apparently, this is kind of a common thing with AdSense. So the lesson here, don't expect any love from AdSense. During all this, I also noticed that a lot of sites were republishing my post. So I started Googling the hardest job everyone thinks they can do, and every time I found a site that had republished my post in its entirety, I sent a very polite email explaining that the contents were copyrighted and requesting that if they wanted to share it to reduce it to an excerpt or a summary only and then link to my blog. Every site that I contacted complied, so that was awesome. But then, a few months later, I decided to expand my search a little bit. So, oops, okay, that button works too. So I started Googling text strings from within the post itself instead of just the title of the post. And that's when I came across this on a site called Female Intel. They had changed the title of the post, but they copied the text verbatim. They also feminized my name. And then there was no mention of my blog. So this is a clear case of content theft, and really they did what a cheating high school student might do, and not even a particularly clever high school student either. I contacted the site administrators and I got zero response. I then found the site's Facebook page and I posted a comment there. Not only did they not respond, a couple hours later I went back on the page and I noticed that I had been blocked on their Facebook page. So obviously they were not looking to comply with my request. And this is when I thought, okay, maybe there's power in numbers. So I went on my own Facebook page and I explained the situation. And then I asked my friends to go on Female Intel and post this pre-written comment. I'm commenting on behalf of Dennis Hong, whom you have blocked from commenting on your page. Please respect his copyright privileges and either remove the plagiarized post below or correct the title or reduce the text to an excerpt only with the link to the original full text on the blog. Thank you. I figured maybe a dozen or so of my friends would jump to my support, but I was wrong. Hundreds of friends and even friends of friends jumped to my support and they went on Female Intel and they slammed it with comments. A few of them even improvised. So here's my favorite comment. Hey, idiot, you ripped this article off without any semblance of permission and you still have not complied with Dennis Hong's simple and reasonable requests to rectify the situation. Who is Brianna? What does she steal from others? How about writing an original piece about Brianna who, in spite of working for a site that purports the champion the causes and values of respectable women, appears to have no moral scruples herself? Actually, scratch that. I will write the article for you and give you a few days to find it and take it. Deal? P.S. Yes, I know Brianna doesn't really exist, just like your sense of journalistic integrity doesn't exist. Pretty awesome, right? By the next morning, if you went to Female Intel's Facebook page, this is the first thing you saw. If you're coming to this page to leave a post about the article written by Dennis Hong, the situation has been dealt with. The staff member who posted his article has been reprimanded and the article has been removed. If you aren't coming to this page for that reason, check out his site at MusingsOnLifeInLove.com and have a good day. So the lesson here, never underestimate the power of a good old-fashioned internet mob. Oh, and beware plagiarists. And finally, let's talk about the legitimate requests to republish. At one point, an editor from the Washington Post emailed me and asked if she could syndicate my post. Basically, she would publish the post in its entirety on their education blog. They would give me a link and an attribution, but I would not be paid. And so I replied that I would prefer that she post only an excerpt or a summary with a link back to my blog. And I never heard back from her. Now as a freelance writer, I frequently see the advice that if someone wants to display my work, they should pay me for it. It's not enough to offer me publicity or exposure, which is what a lot of big name profit-making sites do these days. Bill Wheaton from Star Trek even wrote about this recently. You can't pay your rent with the unique platform and reach our site provides. And on principle, this makes absolute sense. However, the reality is we all have to start somewhere and we all probably have to work for free at some point. Exposure may not pay our rent, but it may get us to the point where we can be more selective about giving away our content. And today I still think about the fact that I could have been featured in the Washington Post and I wonder how much publicity my principles cost me here. So just to recap, here are the lessons I learned. Through all this, be ready to upgrade if your site gets throttled, f-ad-sense, search text strings from your post to seek out plagiarists, and allowing major sites to syndicate may not be a bad thing. And finally, if you want to read the post for yourself and see what all the fuss was about, the title is the hardest job everyone thinks they can do. And I set up a custom domain just for it. So if you go to howhardisteaching.com, it'll take you right to the post and you can read the hell out about it. Just don't plagiarize me, okay? Thank you.