How did I get 12,000 views?
This is a legitimate question
No, seriously. This is not a “How-to” guide type of post. I’m really wondering how that happened. I don’t think the post was particularly better than my other posts. As far as I know, I did the same thing I always do in terms of article popularisation. So why did this exact blog post explode (by my standards, at least)?
Surely we’ve all pondered on the reasons why an article goes viral. I know I have and from the many (probably around 3) guides I’ve read on the subject, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s mostly just chance. Sure, there’s a list of check boxes that you need to mark in order to have better odds, but in the end it goes down to reaching the right people at the right time.
In my case, I posted my article on LinkedIn, Hacker News and some relevant Reddit threads, as I always do. Normally, my articles get a few likes from friends, a couple of upvotes, 1–2 comments and that’s it. This one happened to cause a stir on Hacker News, which apparently attracted more people, like a sandball effect (I’m on a summer vibe).
I don’t think my article content was revolutionary. It’s a popular topic and people have probably written about it thousands of times. So why did it prompt users to comment? My first thoughts are that the topic concerns a work process that doesn’t have a strictly correct way of doing. This might push people to share they’re views on how it should be done or criticise the way of working I’ve described. Still, it requires posting the article at the right time for those exact people to see it. Maybe if just the first commenter hadn’t seen it, it wouldn’t have attracted the attention of the second one and so on.
So my point is, yes — the content is incredibly important (you don’t want to waste people’s time with unnecessary ramblings); and sure, you can research some trends and decide on a popular topic so it has a higher chance of attracting interest; and sure, you can do some research on the optimal length of the post; and sure, you can use some semicolons for good measure — but in the end of the day I firmly believe you need to keep on posting and hope that one of you articles will gain insane amounts of exposure by some wild set of circumstances.
