Have you created or come across a piece of content that performed really well?

Haha! - I wrote The Kanye Story

The story of How I went from lying in bed with no ideas to negotiating with the biggest superstar on planet earth

• Retweeted by Naval, Jack Dorsey, Dynamo!
• 1000+ new followers in < 24 hours!

My one pieces would be write how you talk - just like you're telling the story at down the pub.

Thanks for the mention @louisswiss

@harrydry created an awesome article that did very well pretty much out of nowhere. I'll let him tell the story :)

Yes, I have. It was Elon Musk smoking weed with Joe Rogan. Wow did that thing go viral! Here on the other side of the world, I heard non English-speaking retirees talking about it at the breakfast shop the next day!

All I can say is, WOW was that YT video some killer content!

I've had one article "go viral" in the last month, which was an article called 7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer. It went to #1 on Hacker News and collected over 1500 upvotes, was #1 on /r/programming, and I just learned it was recently shared in the O'Reilly newsletter.

What do I think made it successful?

• People love listicles. It feels like "I can learn something after 30s of reading".
• Slightly dramatic headline.
• It's well-formatted. Scannable headlines, bold phrases, clear "take aways" in boxes. You don't need to actually read it to get the main points.
• It's relatable. In my conference talks and articles, the number one thing I notice is that people LOVE relatable content. Also, relatable and slightly self-deprecating :) People often say, "It sounded like you were telling my story." People love sharing that kind of stuff!

I write a lot of content on a travel blog (about 40k monthly sessions), and I find these points are pretty universally true.

I wrote a post more than a year ago which took the top spot for queries like "most popular digital products" and now more than half the traffic to our blog, and a huge percentage of overall site traffic comes from that post alone.

Not a recent piece of content, but I wrote a piece a few years ago about how to start a lawn mower after it's been sitting around all winter.

My blog is a technical blog mostly, but I do try to post about anything I solve on my own so I have a reference to it later.

Every spring this post crushes it. Gets a ton of additional traffic and is one of my highest earning post on Amazon associates.

The bit of inspiration is sometimes you luck into great evergreen content, so it's worth getting as much stuff, as stupid as you may think it is at the time, out of your head and published.