Successful blog post launch!
My latest blog post was wildly successful by my standards. Here's what I did:
Pre-release:
Shared drafts of the post with a number of friends and get their feedback. Improves the post and also makes them aware that I'll be dropping something. They will be more on the lookout and more willing to RT when I drop it. Sharing a draft feels a bit less spammy than sharing the link once it's out.
Tuesday:
- Published to my Wordpress site
- Posted on Hacker News, Reddit (r/kernel, r/programming).
- It flopped on HN and r/programming. Did well on r/kernel.
- Tweeted about it on my account with 690 followers (<50 actually engaged).
- Sent DMs to a lot of friends that might be interested.
- This is important! Don't wait for them to see it. Actively share it. Pretend it's a mailing list, but you need to do all the manual work.
- Sent cold emails to a lot of my blogging role models that might be interested. The emails thanked them for their work, asked for some advice, and mentioned my recent post.
This gets a medium-small engagement. ~40 likes on Twitter. ~400 page views.
Thursday:
I retweet my announcement tweet. Didn't do much. I had some other plans to post additional follow up content on Twitter to help bump it.
Friday:
Role Model #1 actually responds and posted my blog on Hacker News. And it got on the front page Friday night. That was huge. The page views started rolling in. Little twitter activity though.
Then Saturday, the HN traffic died down as my post left the front page. Then, unexpectedly Role Model #2 (9k followers) retweeted my announcement tweet (he doesn't follow me) and also started a discussion! That started to really kick things off on Twitter. Less traffic to the site than HN, but lots of Twitter activity.
Then as that started to die down, my friend with 10k followers did a quote tweet sharing my announcement tweet to his audience. That kicked off a whole second cycle of Twitter activity and traffic.
At the end of all of this, I have around 3000 page views since I released, and 50 new Twitter followers. Not bad!
While all the Twitter activity was happening, I was watching out for large accounts that were RT/liking/following and DM'd them to say thank you. Never know where those connections may go.
Update:
And it kept going!
On Sunday it made the front page of r/linux, which spurred another boost of viewers.
Lesson: weekends are a good posting time for me.
