Re: Letters: From a Guy Who Looks at Retention Charts All Day
Johnny –
You’ve managed to do the impossible. You turned this:
Into this:
And you did it all with a simple LinkedIn post. Last week you told me that you expected July to come in around June – a “feat,” in your words, since I’d imagine view count typically declines month over month with a static reader base – but now here we are, at the end of July, and my views are back on the rise.
It turns out that publishing your kind words of encouragement was the best publicity this site could have asked for! The post went viral (by my pathetic standards) and skyrocketed to top viewed of all-time:
Now the question is – how sticky are those views? Hopefully, across the 144 views, at least a handful of those readers browsed other pieces on the site (see below), and of those, maybe one or two could become longer-term readers. Viral content is clearly the key to getting people in the door, and then my “back catalog,” as you put it, can hopefully keep them there.
Of course, like I said in Statistically Insignificant, all of this can be easily manipulated! Maybe all of these views are from you proudly reading and re-reading your first “published” piece of writing. Don’t worry. I do the same thing.
Emmett