No Knowledge Base Tags? I Wrote a 100K+ Article Using This Anti-Logic, Believe It or Not
I've written over 200 viral articles in the trading circle.
Guess which one performed the best?
It wasn't a "dry content" article packed with data tags. Nor was it a "technical post" deconstructing candlestick patterns.
It was an article where I didn't use a single industry term tag.
[💬 Honestly]
Don’t brush it off. That day, I opened my WeChat Official Account backend, ready to write an article about "How Traders Can Identify False Breakouts."
I spent an hour scrolling through my knowledge base tags. Technical analysis, fundamentals, capital flows, sentiment cycles, MACD divergence, head-and-shoulders breakout... I had all the tags. But I just couldn’t write.
Why? Because the tags had boxed me in.
The More Tags You Have, The Harder It Is to Write
Have you ever been in this situation? You have hundreds of industry keywords at your fingertips, feeling like you can write about anything. But when you open a blank page, the cursor blinks for 20 minutes, and not a single word comes out.
I called a friend who’s a junior trader and asked him what his deepest insight was lately.
He said one thing: "I realized that 80% of the money I lost was because of emotions, not technique."
He told me a story. Last year, he shorted crude oil. Technicals, news, fundamentals—all pointed to a decline. He opened a short position. Then the price nudged up by $3. He panicked and closed the trade, losing $300. By the close that day, crude had dropped $8. If he had held, he would have made $2,400.
I asked him what was going through his mind. He said: "Technically and tag-wise, everything supported my short. But I was scared. Scared it would really reverse."
Isn’t that the most eternal human nature in trading? Fear and greed don’t need any tags.
[💬 Truth be told]
That day, I wrote an article titled *"I Admit: Trading Isn’t About Reading Candlesticks, It’s About Reading Human Nature."* The first line was: "Guess why I lost $300 yesterday? Because I understood the candlesticks but didn’t understand my own fear." This article used zero knowledge base tags.
Guess what happened to it? [📝 I experienced something similar last year. I closed a position out of fear and missed a chance to double my money.]
A "Dry Content" Article with 25 Tags vs. a "Human Nature" Article with One Real Experience
I did the math.
| Article Type | Title | Number of Tags | Views | Shares |
|-------------|-------|---------------|-------|--------|
| Tag-driven dry content | "Trading Advanced: 3 Practical Uses of MACD Divergence" | 25 industry tags | 1,300 | 45 |
| Real-experience human nature piece | "I Admit: Trading Isn’t About Reading Candlesticks, It’s About Reading Human Nature" | 0 tags | 5,200 | 233 |
The reader experience is completely different. With dry content, the reader feels like a student passively receiving 15 "knowledge points"—like being in a lecture. With a human nature piece, the reader feels like a friend listening to you say "I’ve been burned"—like having a chat.
Data doesn’t lie.
I then wrote seven more "zero-tag" articles, all based on real conversations with my trading friends:
• Fear: How a trader lost $1,000 but gained a theory
• Greed: After making $200 in 5 minutes, I made the dumbest decision
• Self-deception: Why did I choose not to look when the level was clearly broken?
• Hesitation: From hesitation to missing out: a trader’s most painful experience
• Revenge: After losing $500, I frantically added positions—what happened next?
• Obsession: Why do I always go the wrong way? Because I don’t trust myself
• Relaxation: On vacation, I couldn’t keep my hands off trading and lost half a year’s profits
None were tag-driven. Every single one was human-nature-driven.
95% of Authors Get Stuck Here—Guess What They Did Next?
I have a student with over 500 industry tags in her knowledge base. She asked me, "Lin, which tag should I use to write a viral article?"
I said, "Forget all the tags first. Answer three questions."
- What are your readers most afraid of?
- What are your readers most greedy for?
- What is your own most painful experience?
She thought for two days. On the third day, she handed me a draft titled *"From Losing to Winning: It Took Me 3 Years to Prove—Trading Is Not Technique, It’s the Process of Overcoming Human Nature."* It used zero knowledge base tags. It went viral on the first try, with views exceeding the total of her previous 30 articles combined.
[📝 Last month, I tried this method too. I wrote about my own experience of chasing highs out of greed and losing money. My views tripled overnight.]
Don’t believe me? I’ll tell you why. Real experience beats organized tags every time.
Tags are secondhand information organized by others. Real experience is firsthand blood and tears. The latter is always more vivid—because it has specific names, times, numbers, and emotions.
This Table Is the Most Valuable Part of the Whole Article
| Viral Article DNA | Tag-Driven | Human-Nature-Driven |
|------------------|-----------|-------------------|
| Source | Knowledge base, textbooks, courses | Personal experience, friends’ stories, industry observations |
| Writing speed | 800 words/hour (need to look up data) | 2,000 words/hour (flows naturally) |
| Reader trust | 3/10 (cold, dry theory) | 9/10 (emotional resonance) |
| Sharing rate | 0.5% | 5%–8% |
| Risk of deletion | Medium (may trigger professional review) | Low (personal experience sharing) |
Without Tags, Where Do I Even Find Topics?
Here are the three no-tag topic methods I use myself.
Method 1: Tap into the Two Major Pain Points of Human Nature
In trading, emotional feedback is always complete: fear is the fear of losing money, greed is the desire to make money, hesitation is the fear of missing out, obsession is the refusal to admit defeat, revenge is wanting to recover losses, relaxation is letting your guard down, self-deception is avoidance. You don’t need any technical tags. You just need to ask yourself: Which emotion did I experience yesterday?
[💬 In fact] Haven’t you closed a position out of fear before? Haven’t you chased highs out of greed?
Method 2: Replace "What" with "Why"
Tag-driven articles love writing about "what"—like "What is MACD divergence?" But nobody likes reading about "what." People like reading about "why." Why do I always hesitate during breakouts? Why do I add positions after a loss? Why do I want to close a trade after making $200?
"Why" questions naturally carry stories. One "why" question can be broken down into at least five extended titles. The key is you don’t need any specialized knowledge—only honesty.
Method 3: Start with a Sentence That Sparks a Story
Many of my viral articles began with a single line of dialogue: "What makes trading so difficult?" "The difficulty is admitting you’re wrong." That simple. Starting from an everyday conversation, you naturally unfold the story and end with a point. For example, from that sentence, I concluded: Trading isn’t learned; it’s repented.
Last 3 Tips I Personally Use
- Use WeChat chat logs as your topic pool: Every day, look at what your friends complain about, what they’re proud of, what they regret—those are ready-made topics. Because all trading behavior is ultimately a projection of human behavior.
- Put yourself in the reader’s shoes: You’re not teaching someone; you’re saying, "I did this, follow me." This light empathy replaces lengthy lectures. Readers won’t feel lectured—they’ll be moved by you.
- Delete all tags after writing, then read it again: If the article can still stand without tags, it’s alive. After writing, ruthlessly review to make the article more vivid and human.
Not long ago, a 90s trader who just started a public account asked me: "Lin, what if I don’t even have ‘real experiences’? I’ve only been in the industry for three months."
I said, "Do you have fear? Do you have doubt?" He said yes. "Then that’s enough. Three months of fear and three years of fear are the same in the reader’s eyes—because you’re not lying."
Fear is fear. Greed is greed. Tags are just the outer garment of knowledge. Human nature is the core of the story.
You might not have any industry tags at all. But you definitely have fear and greed.
[📝 Think back to your most recent trade or life decision—what emotion drove you to make an irrational move? That moment is your viral article topic.]
Comment below and tell me: When you write, what tag do you fear missing the most? Or do you not even dare to use tags, afraid that no one will read your work?
So, without a knowledge base tag system, are you really unable to write a viral article?