Why Aren't I More Viral?

Happy to report that I have [finally] passed 10,000 unique page views of my blog. Obviously the blog reaches many more people than that, because I have subscribers (through email, RSS, etc.), people pass from one to another, and so on.

But it is at least one indication.

One the one hand, nice that over the past year, since I created this blog, there have been 10,000 views  of what I spend time to create. I have not parsed to see  "unique" visitors (even that stat would be  fluffy, as the same person without a static IP address or cookies from this site would appear different every time). But all the same, 10,000 is nice round number.

On the other hand, how depressing. Some ridiculous postings to Youtube have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, that took minutes to create. Some even millions of views. Why aren't I more viral? How come millions are not flocking to read my pearls of wisdom? One reason could be that I spend zero time and energy on marketing this blog...but that should not stop viral effect in its purist form.

This brings me back to something Elie Wurtman said to me about the blog when I started -- it should be
about quality, not quantity. So thank you, dear reader, for sticking by me. And pass this on to a friend;-).

Comments

[Phil Johnston]

Hi Jacob,

Perhaps one of the reasons is that you have been picked up by FeedBurner's "Venture Capital Combined" feed. Do they give you results for this feed of feeds?

Phil

[Nathaniel McNamara]

You might consider a few ways to get greater virality:

1) get easier distribution of your stories through digg, reddit, etc. to allow more people to discover you and your content
2) Write more original posts that others actively link to. Jason Calacanis is a master of this by being somewhat controversial in his posts.
3) Link to other people more frequently to allow them to discover you.

Hope that helps.
Nathaniel