If you ever go viral, don't make the mistake I did

Hindsight is always 20/20.

Dec 11, 2020

Happy Friday,

Some people write about their successes on Medium under the pretext of helping. Usually, they’re not helping. They’re kind of bragging. It’s only helping if it can be replicated. It usually can’t. Recipes are for cookies, not cash.

I’ve been in the internet marketing game far too long to think there’s a blueprint. If there is, it’s this—build something that stands the test of time. Trust and an email list will take you farther than almost anything else there is.

Then, when they actually learn something, they keep it to themselves. They share to feed their ego and hoard the things that would actually help anyone.

So I want to tell you about a dumb mistake I made, so you don’t make the same mistake. In hindsight, I should have known better.

On Sunday, a post started getting crazy views…

I usually get 1000 to 1500 views per day during the week. Less on weekends. I tend to check stats every night. So, Sunday night, I checked my stats and they’d passed 5000 views. I thought “wow, that’s fun!” — and went to bed. lol.

I had no frame of reference for what was about to happen. Monday, I hit the trending list on Medium.

The post stayed in the trending section all of Monday and part of Tuesday and got 39,989 views in one day. 11 short of hitting 40,000 views. In a day. Wow.

And you know what I did? Nothing. I watched in shock. lol.

What I should have done…

In hindsight, I realized there were little things I should have done, but didn’t. Here’s what I didn’t think of at the time.

1. I should have added a discrete footer

Medium is now using that “endless content” feed that shows readers more posts. Except they’re from the publication, not the writer. So when all those readers got to the end of the post, all they saw was posts from other writers. I should have added a footer link. Not a big honking obnoxious footer, because most credible publications don’t like that. But a tasteful link. If you like my writing, get more here, with a link to my own publication, or my substack.

2. I should have pinned a popular post.

Work has been busy. Ecommerce during the holidays is brutal. So all I’d posted recently was a bunch of “short” posts. It didn’t occur to me to think about what new readers would see if they went to my profile. I could have posted something new. Or even pinned a popular post. But I didn’t. So anyone that found me through that trending piece probably didn’t find anything else to read. They’d have had to scroll pretty far down to find anything else with substance. Don’t make that mistake, okay? If you see your views picking up, take a look at your profile to make sure it’s inviting to new readers that don’t know your work yet.

3. I could have posted something fresh. Didn’t do that, either.

Most of the people who found the article found it in the trending section. Some measure of them went to my profile after that. I wish I’d had a new piece up there for them to discover. But I didn’t. Didn’t even occur to me. My post started picking up speed on Sunday night and I didn’t post anything new until so late Monday it was almost Tuesday already. Literally, minutes before midnight. By then, the number of new visitors was dwindling fast.

The point is this…

We can’t plan to go viral. There’s too much randomness involved. Seems to me that the posts I think will do well seldom do, and the ones that take off are the ones I didn’t expect to. So we can’t plan that.

But we can plan for how best to provide an enticing reading experience to new readers who find us if we do have a post take off.

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”

—John F. Kennedy

What I wrote this week…

Thanks for reading. If you’re reading in email, just click the title to leave a comment. Fyi, the hearts are votes here. If you enjoyed this, click the heart to let me know. I try to write more of what you like, and less of what you don’t.

xo,
Linda

Hello, Writer!

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