Our teammate Jan-Erik Asplund recently wrote a piece for the Animalz blog that blew up. The piece—BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful—trended on Hacker News and racked up 30,000+ pageviews in just a few days. It was shared all over Twitter, included in a few popular newsletters, mentioned on Lifehacker, and earned links from 120 domains. We had a real whale on our hands.

What happened next was unexpected. Our traffic increased 4x—and then it sustained for the next few months, even long after the surge died off. Today, Jan explains how and why he wrote the post and we dissect the impact it had on our site.