Last year I have published three(!) “biggest link building success” articles of 2013. Can I top that for 2014? Yes, I can.
I have had the single most shared article in my decade of business blogging published in 2014 with 4000+ shares.
No, it wasn’t on a mainstream publication. I usually got below 100 shares there.
The biggest success: a list of failures
Sometimes success is a direct outcome of failure. Last year I have published an article dealing with my biggest mistakes from a decade of SEO practice and beyond. While it covered my failures it collected shares like no other post in my whole career, not even my legendary resources lists from the early years of business blogging. Back when lists were still the exception and I ruthlessly overwhelmed my readers with listicles almost every week. It has surpassed them by far.
Indeed I never had an article with more than 1000 shares, after all I mostly have written for small independent blogs not the prominent industry leaders like Moz or Search Engine Land. Yet, here I was with almost (and by now more than) 4000 shares! Yes, that’s “four thousand”. I felt not only humbled by the sheer number but also pretty embarrassed with seeing my worst mistakes in plain sight of so many people.
It was just a follow up and another failure for me!
The success came unexpectedly as the post was only a follow up to more balanced post on lessons from my SEO decade I have published here on the Ahrefs blog that garnered fewer than 100 shares, which is pretty common for posts on Ahrefs including mine. So what the heck happened?
Is it just cruelty from all those people who want to spit on me publicly and rejoice in my misery? I doubt it.
The most ironic aspect of the whole story is that it was my last article on Positionly. They have given up on me and business blogging with third party writers in general as far as I understand and switched to a rather self-promotional style instead. Even after the spectacular success of my post they haven’t changed their mind.
Trying to explain the success
Let’s return to the success part of the story though. You might wonder why that specific post went so popular even though it was just a follow up on a post that only had an average number of shares. I made some formal mistakes in the first post here on Ahrefs I think. It was too undecided.
It was covering both positive and negative lessons so that the message wasn’t clear. Also I used subheadings that didn’t mean much by themselves. They were only meant to structure the text.
In my successful follow up post every single subheading delivered a strong message by itself
so that people scanning the text quickly and looking for clues got hooked instantly. People even have written me mail and social media messages because of that article. I think that never really happened until now. Every single mistake I made wasn’t just mine. People recognized themselves in my failures.
Look at the big influencer and his misery
As a reader you might tend to idolize blog writers as influencers etc. but the reality is we’re all just human beings with flaws. I’m not Neil Patel who always seems to have success stories to serve. In contrast I stumble and fall all the time.
I’m not a millionaire either (otherwise I wouldn’t need to blog for money I guess). So by admitting mistakes and exposing my vulnerability I provided something people could identify with. I guess they thought something like this:
Hey, look, here’s this guy with 10k followers on Google+ and 5k on Twitter and he struggles just like myself!
That’s true. As we say in Germany “I’m just cooking with water” like everybody else. That’s an important thing to remember. People tend to compare their true self with all the drawbacks to the idealized image of public figures. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are always looking better than us!
Shares are not links but they help
You might also argue that thousands of shares are fine but not be mixed up with links. That’s true. While shares on sites like Facebook, Twitter or Google+ are displayed as links in the code of those sites they count less or in different ways for your actual Google rankings. So 4000 shares do not equal 4000 links. Yet,
there is no doubt that increased social media publicity has also positive effects
on the site as a whole, the overall perception of the brand and the credibility of it. After all social proof counts directly. In this case my admission of failure also made this blog appear more trustworthy than all those 200% success blogs out there that never admit a mistake. After all everybody knows that life is not all about sunshine so you can’t fool people with an “always happy” image.
* Creative Commons image by Nils Sautter
