This one weird trick boosted my traffic by 86,700%
(spoiler: it was the headline, and that stat is bogus)
This is an intentionally absurd and clickbait-y headline to make a point. My traffic yesterday jumped from an average of 3 visits per day (wow!) to 2604, which is an 86,700% increase. As with most clickbait headlines, this is pretty meaningless, but I thought the headline was funny anyway. Hope you’re having an amazing Tuesday!
Yesterday I wrote a little piece about a COVID-19 “research review” I read over the weekend and why I thought it wasn’t credible. It wasn’t my greatest piece of writing, but I was fairly pleased at the way it turned out, so I shared it on Hacker News.
Ten minutes later, it was rocketing up the homepage, gathering votes and comments quickly. The comments were fairly polarized, and enough people flagged it for the HN algorithm to kill the story and remove it. All in less than an hour.
Over the course of that hour, I got thousands of visits to the post. Here’s what my Substack dashboard looks like now:
(side note: all graphs should come with an option to exclude outliers)
Not my first experience hitting the HN homepage, but my first in many years. Just thought I’d share a few takeaways from this experience.
Headlines matter
I’ve been doing copywriting and email marketing for years, so I know this, but I also haven’t been in “marketer mode” with this newsletter, which I think is the right choice. My original headline yesterday was something like “Good vs. bad heuristics”.
Snooze.
On a whim, I changed it to the more eye-catching: No, I won’t read your COVID-19 “research paper”
Judging by the overall negative reaction to the post and how short-lived it was, I don’t think it would have gotten nearly as much play without the headline, and probably rightfully so.
People shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, but they do. I’ll put more time into headlines going forward.
Don’t sell what you can’t deliver
More importantly, I’m going to add some time in to put on my “editor hat” and review each day’s post with a critical eye. I don’t want readers who were hooked by the headline to feel let down by the post itself.
Some of the criticism of my post yesterday was fair, and in retrospect I wish I had taken a little more time to tighten up my arguments and think about common questions or objections from a reader. I don’t want to write too defensively, but I felt some commenters weren’t understanding my position because I hadn’t explained myself well enough in places.
Additionally, all that traffic did double my subscriber count…but that means we went from 3 to 6. About 0.1% of yesterday’s visitors subscribed, which is not ideal. Some of this is the nature of social media traffic spikes, which tend to be fleeting, but I suspect that some extra time spent on the post would have paid off in a bigger boost in subscribers.
I can do this
Overall, the experience yesterday was quite uplifting. I’ve had many posts hit the HN homepage, but not for almost a decade at this point. It’s encouraging to see that it’s still possible in 2020 for a nobody to write something that gets some attention. I’m optimistic that as my writing improves and my focus tightens, this newsletter will continue to grow.
Thanks for reading, have an awesome Tuesday!
Much love,
Ryan
PS - On Friday I’m launching newsletter² (pronounced “newsletter squared”), a new paid email newsletter about paid email newsletters. I’ve been making money from email for years now and I’m obsessed with this growing trend of independent writers launching paid newsletters. I’ll be sharing the most valuable articles, tools, and other resources that I’ve found for people who are interested in this space, and I’ve got a ton of ideas for where to go in the future (interviews, case studies, how to guides, etc). First edition goes out Friday, so you should sign up right now: