Monica Lent - What all viral content has in common

BLOGGING FOR DEVS (#33)

Happy Friday! Monica here.

Over the last week, me, you, and millions of others around the world were strangely enthralled by the answer to one question:

Is the ship still stuck?

The entire saga of the Ever Given, a container ship longer than the Empire State Building, bearing 99,155 tons of cargo, which had been sideswiped by a sandstorm into blocking 10% of the world's trade through the Suez Canal in Egypt.

It cost roughly $59 billion dollars (!) over the course of 6 days.

But what's more even more interesting (at least to a blogger like me) is the story behind the viral website istheshipstillstuck.com.

In 5 days, it reached over 50 million people — almost as many as the New York Times does according to SimilarWeb.

And all it took was a single tweet from a 300-follower Twitter account to set the entire thing off.

Here's what this website can teach us about writing viral content.

(Without being famous on the internet.)

Ingredients of a viral website

If you didn't pick it up off Hacker News on Wednesday, Tom, the creator of istheshipstillstuck.com, posted a behind-the-scenes account. It's pretty interesting if you haven't read it yet.

And here's the original site if you missed it, too:

In his writeup, Tom revealed that the website:

• Took one day to build
• Was promoted by a single tweet from his 300-follower account
• Got picked up on Hacker News with over 1,000 comments
• Attracted over 190,000 likes, comments, and shares on Facebook
• Was ultimately visited by 50,000,000 people
• Made virtually no money

But what exactly was it about this website that caused it to spread like wildfire in the first place?

Turns out, it's the same ingredients for most viral content.

Whether it's tweets, websites, memes, or anything else that gets shared online, viral content almost always has these 3 elements:

1. Topic — Trending topics are critical, and this site covered a top news story. A popular term for this is newsjacking.
2. Timing — He launched the site at the absolute peak of international interest. Any later, and it would've flopped.
3. Broad Appeal — An extremely high percentage of people exposed to the topic could find it interesting. This explains the astronomical 20% Twitter engagement rate.

He also did a couple of smart things, which devs tend to forget.

Namely, having good social sharing meta tags (you can test your Twitter ones here). Luckily his coworker pointed this out before he posted.

But there were some mistakes, too.

He didn't have web analytics set up until late in the game, and found no reliable way to make any kind of money from those 50 million visitors.

Ads, affiliate marketing, and even NFTs (the latest word I've muted on Twitter 😅) are long-term plays that take preparation.

In the end, he's up +3,000 Twitter followers and apparently now has a Substack with a great first post.

The takeaway?

Once you know how it works, there are somewhat predictable ways to engineer virality.

Topic, timing, and broad appeal are all critical.

And with the right combination, your blog post or side project can take on a life of its own with little work from you.

That's the power of the internet!

At the same time, it is so important to prepare for success:

Ask yourself "What could go right?" and plan accordingly

I cannot tell you how many people in the Blogging for Devs community and newsletter subscribers have told me about their surprise virals hits...

And then seriously regret not having set up their email list, analytics events, or even a link to their Twitter account in advance.

If you missed these past editions, here are two to help you get set up:

• How to optimize your newsletter for signups 📬
• Minimum Viable Analytics 🌱

Have a great long weekend! And thanks for reading.

Yours truly,

@monicalent

P.S. If you've ever had a viral hit (even if it didn't quite reach 50 million people), I'd love to hear about it! Or if you had something you thought was great, and it bombed, let's chat, too.

Hit reply to this email and share your story!