I recently wrote a post that got a lot of views. It wasn’t any better than anything else I’ve written. It might’ve been worse. But a hell of a lot of people read it. So what was so special about this post? The title of this post, that’s what.

At it’s surface, the title of the record breaking post wasn’t so much clickbait as it was just inaccurate. But given people’s love for iPhones, it was clickbait. You own an iPhone? You clicked on it. Pretty straightforward. At the end of the day, however, not that many people even know this blog exists, and even fewer read it. So even if I maxed out my potential viewership, it’s still only so many people that are reading it.

The magic this time around came from Twitter. I do this for fun, but I enjoy when people read what I’m writing. Wild I know. So I’ve been playing around with how my Tweets look when I share them to hopefully draw some fresh eyeballs to the site. My latest effort is adding hashtags that relate to the post to catch people that might be interested. This time around I used #iPhone12. It worked.

Normally, my readers are exclusively from USA. Makes sense. Occasionally I get the stray Baidu search, but 99% is coming from the homeland. Here’s the country breakdown for today in order from most views to least:

So yeah, that’s a bit different. What happened here was never my intention. You might like the #Packers, you see a post of mine, you think it’s funny, and maybe you check out the site once in awhile. That’s all I’m looking for. I actually kind of felt bad when I started seeing the traffic jump. I got over it of course and it just became fascinating.

Let’s take out a recent run where I posted six times in two days. Yesterday brought three times the traffic than any other day I ever had. Then I had even more today. That was before I even posted this. Which unless I figure out a catchy hashtag will only bring minimal views, but still. I didn’t even post anything today. That post alone had six times as many views as my next best post, which I just wrote last week. In my little world, that’s absolutely crazy.

So if you ever get annoyed with the Buzzfeeds of the world and the clickbait trash of the internet, get used to it. That shit works.

YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS BLOGGER DID TO GET PEOPLE TO READ HIS SITE!!!