How did I make a Viral Post
Readers do appreciate in-depth documentation
What is this?
I just had an explosion in the growth of my subscribers and this post is an analysis of what happened.
So what is going on?
Hunting for Clues
First, I went to look at this specific timespan in my traffic area, and as you can see, there is a correspondingly large amount of views on the 16th of July, which is also the date that I gained all these new subscribers.
The traffic data shows that a lot of views came from the Substack app instead of from YouTube, so it's not really the result of a YouTube video that links to this blowing up.
Since this is traffic that came from Substack itself, I should be looking to see what I did on this platform which can be divided into “Posts” and “Notes”.
Below you can see the posts that I have published recently.
Looking at my posts, I do see an outlier, which is the third post, how I organize my notes with tags.
This post has a lot more views compared to its open rate, which tells me that it probably had a rather successful note that drew a lot of people to come and look at it.
Going into it, I see that the timeline is correct. There is a same huge spike in views here as when my subscriber count spiked up.
But the weird thing is that it only has two subscribers attributed to it, and I have had a huge gain of around twenty.
This is the note I restacked to share it.
Which is a very basic note that, as far as I can tell, doesn't really have huge engagement. There's only one click.
The next thing I looked at was who liked my note. So maybe because they liked it, their followers saw it. And there are three people who liked my note. Two who I have actually spoken to before, and I don't know if this is it.
The last option I'm looking at is just the content of the post and the title. Of the post. I think a lot of people are interested in how do I organize my notes and how do I use tags efficiently.
Reasoning
Based off my previous experience with a post that blew up compared to my other notes, I found that pinning the post helps a lot, but in the end, it is doing actual work developing the idea and searching for ideas that I would have appreciated as a beginner.
This is my most popular post so far. And you can see that it has around the same number of views. So it's possibly the same group of interested people who have come to look at both posts, and some of them decided to subscribe.
One thing that both posts have in common is that they are distillations of what I have learned over the years of trying to do a Zettelkasten and organize my notes.
The common topic of personal knowledge management systems and how you can use what I have documented of my system to try and make your own.
7 Minute Zettelkasten Kickstarter is a very visual guide to making your own Zettelkasten note. I did post a 22 minute long youtube video documenting my process that links to this post, and I believe some of my audience from my YouTube channel, with around 900 subscribers, came over from there onto Substack. And so I have 10 subscribers from there.
How I Organize My Notes with Tags shares my documentation of my extensive tagging system that I use alongside my meta template picker. It goes into a lot more depth compared to the other posts that I have made about organizing my Zettelkasten system. With a title that is very direct in the value that it's offering. I think my audience also likes to read about other people’s workflows (like me trawling through dotfiles). There is something about looking at somebody else's system documented well that really inspires you to develop your own.
I think people also really like very short and direct guides, like How to Interstitial Journal in One Minute, which got around 81 views and one subscription.
Hi Pamela! A mention of your article in the Obsidian.Rocks newsletter may have had something to do with it. That's how I discovered Actionable Notes on July, 16th. :-)