Introduction
As the title suggests, this guide will hopefully make your story more popular. I'll tell you about all the ways that will help you make your story gather more views, subscribers, and hopefully even comments and upvotes. I'll assume that you already read my other guides, and therefore know all the other stuff I talked about earlier. If not, then you can check the links at the bottom of this post.



1) High-quality Description and Attractive Title
What makes potential readers more likely to click on your story in the first place? It's how your story is presented among the thousands of others. First, you need an appealing title. That means, your title should attract the attention of people browsing through latest stories. How to achieve that?

Your title shouldn't have ANY errors in it at all. If the title has an error, many readers won't even spare a glance at it again. Make sure all grammar in your title is correct. Since most titles are just a couple of words anyway, that shouldn't bee too much of a problem. Also, make sure to have proper capitalization for your title. The most standard, and probably most appealing as well can be seen on the old good "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." All nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, verbs, and adverbs should be capitalized. All particles, prepositions, and conjunctions should be lower case, unless they are longer than 4 characters (then you can choose), or they are the first word in the title (then it should be upper case).

The description is also important. Your description should give a brief introduction to what is going to happen in the story, but it should not reveal too much. If possible, try making it so that people can actually read part of it before they click on it--layouts can completely make your description invisible from the outside, and many readers who see the infamous "..." will just skip your story, because they simply don't care for a story with no description.

Also, make your description as engaging as possible. It's been proven that question prompts hook readers into the story far better than summaries. Let me give an example; which of these two do you feel would have more effect on drawing readers in?

"Because his parents abuse him, Hongbin tries to run away from home."
"Will Hongbin be able to run away from home and his abusive parents?"

Those might not be perfect examples since I made them up in like 3 seconds, but you should still see the point I'm making. The question (which is often placed at the end of the description) makes readers more curious, and thus more likely to click "next" at the end of your foreword.



2) Visual Appeal
It's a fact. Stories with nice backgrounds and cute posters are going to gather a LOT more readers than huge blocks of text. You should always request for some sort of graphics, or make your own. For some reason, people around here seem to think that bad graphics equals bad story. Of course, not all of them do, but you can't deny that many people will click the nice red "X" after they see that your story doesn't have even one picture in it. So, in case you're still new to AFF, here's what you can do:

1) Request at a graphics shop. Most of them are free-of-charge, and they only want you to follow a couple of rules. ALWAYS follow the rules. You do not want to be blacklisted for not following them. Sometimes, if you request at another shop, and that shop happens to be affiliates with the shop where you're blacklisted, they won't accept your request because they see you on the blacklist. After you request, wait for the graphics to be done. When you pick up, always leave a comment of appreciation, even if the shop doesn't tell you to. Credit the shop somewhere in your description/foreword, and apply your graphics!

2) Request for a layout. These days, even graphics is not enough anymore. Layout is another measure to make your story look even more appealing. Even this blog post that you're reading has a very basic layout applied; for some reason, a huge block of text that is inside a box like this looks more appealing than just a normal block of text. So, how do you request? A lot of graphics shops do layout these days, or if you want to, you can go directly to a layout shop. Another option is to visit the Layout Marketplace (Your Profile->Other->Layouts->Layout Marketplace). There, you can browse through some of the layouts that people posted there. Sometimes, they will ask you to pay with karma points. I don't think it's worth it, since you can request for a personalized layout at a shop without paying anything, but then again, it's your story. There are more guides to help you mount layouts in the Layout bar; I'll introduce some of basic HTML next time around.



3) Advertising
There are many ways in which you can advertise your story. I'll talk about the most common ones: reviews, advertising shops, recommendation lists, wall advertising, self-advertising, and bidding.

1) Reviews: review shops aren't just places where you can get your story critiqued--it also helps promoting your story, especially if you receive a high score. Some review shops even have their own "featured stories" page, and if you land a spot there, you are sure to get at least a handful of new readers.

2) Advertising Shop: I've never used services of one of those, but they're quite similar to review shop advertising. You get to have your story featured in a chapter. However, it's much less likely to gain attention than in a review shop. They do, however, offer more services--they often do something on top of that, like wall advertising, about which I'll talk later.

3) Recommendation List: Well, if you find a recommendation list (often fandom-biased), and you think your story could potentially be on that list, try asking the owner to read your story. If they like it and you land a spot, you are guaranteed that 20-70% of the subscribers will check out your story. And if you get a PM from someone that they want to feature your story, it's even better! Free advertising!

4) Wall Advertising: Well, you basically just copy-paste something about your story and post in on other people's walls. Most users will go to the "online-now" section and just spam walls of people online ATM. There are three possible outcomes: a) the person will actually check your story out, so you succeeded; b) the person will just ignore you, and you'll be sad; c) the person will get mad at you and block you for spamming their wall. I usually check the story out, but hardly ever actually get interested enough to read more.

5) Self-advertising: The easiest way how to advertise your story is write a blog post about it and mention your story everywhere you are. I suggest not doing that while commenting on other people's stories or blogs, because you'll come off as rude, in which case you might get downvoted... But if you have a large friend base, then posting a blog will definitely help a lot!

6) Bidding: The most effective way of advertising on AFF, save for getting featured (but if you get featured, then you've already succeeded, right?). You get to have your story mentioned for 24 hours in that little blue box that floats like everywhere on this site. You'll usually get about 5-10k views and a couple hundred subscribers (if your story is really good). Again, your description should be really good so you can hook readers. Now, how to win a bid? First, don't even try if you don't have at least 7000 karma points. People will tear you apart. You'll get out-bidden even before you click bid. That's auto-bid for you. But, if you do have enough points, then go ahead. Although I suggest not getting into the bid until 2-3 hours before the deadline, so you minimalize the skyrocketing of the price due to bidding war. Seriously, you do NOT want to spend 55k points on 1 day of advertising. You can have like one week of advertising for that amount if you know how to bid.



Other guides: Basic Writing Guide, Basic Grammar Guide