Nothing kills a blog like a viral post

Nothing kills a blog like a viral post | elliot.my Nothing kills a blog like a viral post 12 Mar, 2026 I’ve run three blogs before this one and they’re all dead. And all for the same reason: a post became popular, attention arrived, and I froze. For a writer, a hit changes the room. You quickly stop writing for yourself and start writing for an audience (with imagined expectations). You stop exploring and start performing, and that next post can become impossible. You feel you need to match the last one, and repeat the success. So you polish, you wait, you doubt. Drafts pile up, unpublished. And with a burgeoning drafts folder the blog silently dies. My last post – "I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21" – did well on Hacker News and the Bear Blog discover page and got a lot of traffic. Right on cue, I froze. I could write, I just couldn't hit "publish". Weeks went by without a new post. And I learnt yet again that success doesn't always breed confidence, but fear. I reached out to Robert Birming , who seems to write a few posts a week without fail. He published his advice to me on his blog: I don't think my blogging doubts ever will go away. I just try to accept that that's the way it is and probably always will be. Every time we've hit the publish button, the imaginary worst-case scenarios have never become reality. Essentially, the doubt never goes away – you just need to accept it and publish anyway. The only antidote is a deliberate indifference to the outcome. So that's what this post is. My previous post distilled 34 years of my life's lessons. This one is more ordinary. And that's okay. I'm killing any expectation by refusing to wait for perfection. My advice to my fellow writers is this: the next post doesn't need to match your last one. It just needs to exist. #advice #articles #blogging #writing