Last Friday night, Cathy and I were eating out and she stepped away from the table for a minute. I got an idea for a blog post and scribbled a top-10 list on my napkin. When we got home, I cranked out the post in 20 minutes and we went about our evening.
Six days later, that post had attracted 93,000 unique visitors and more than 200 comments from all over the world. How’d that happen? Don’t ask me. I submitted it to one high-traffic site, which picked it up, and then four or five others followed.
Check it out if you haven’t read it. If I knew the formula, I’d bottle it. Since I don’t, I guess we’ll keep stumbling along as usual.
My attempt at explaining it:
The blogosphere likes lists.
And, the world is increasingly nationalistic, it seems to me. The fact that an American generated a list of the top 10 countries/cultures is also noteworthy…both for your erudition (considered all too rare) and your chutzpah.
Pitting tribe against tribe always works, especially at World Cup time.
I read the original post early on and had no idea how it had exploded. Which sites did you submit it to?
Just Fark…after that, folks who saw it there posted it on i-am-bored, digg, and quite a few others. truly viral.
Because the 10 Hottest Female News Anchors was already done?
;-p
It’s a universal human topic which also tapped into the current ‘World Hates America’ Zeitgeist.
Just try another one today called “Why America is great” and see what happens.
Yeah, I was going to do a post on “Why Bill Green Is Great” — but my pre-post focus groups and other market research indicated that only one guy would probably read it
Actually, it should be “Top 10 Reasons…”
I couldn’t come up with 10. If you can, I’ll post them.