The viral post you should not copy

More than 40,000 views in one day for a blog post written in eight minutes sounds great. But you shouldn’t count on that approach bearing fruit in the long run, if at all…

It was 2012 and I was writing a daily roundup of API news for ProgrammableWeb. One tweet stood out to me:

This seemed worthy of its own post, which I wrote in less than 10 minutes. Thanks to a quick share on Hacker News—and being a quiet Thursday afternoon—it exploded.

The company profiled, Parse, had an API endpoint for developers to apply for a job. It was original, clever, and the sort of thing that got people talking.

One of the founders would go on to tell me he felt like everyone knew them that day. The company later sold to Facebook—should I take credit?

Nope. While it’s exciting when there’s a viral hit, it quickly dies down. Even worse, they’re unpredictable. Yes, you should do things to stand out. You also should look for the more evergreen opportunities that will bring a consistent supply of the right developers.

As a media property, page views were an important metric for ProgrammableWeb. They can help guide your efforts, too… but it’ll take consistent traffic over viral content.

Next week we’ll share more about how you can tell good page views from vanity views.

Or, if you want to discuss directly, reach out to the EveryDeveloper team.