Hi, it's Takuya.
I'm sharing my experience on a profitable product called Inkdrop, a Markdown note-taking app on which I'm working alone.
I recently started cross-posting my articles to dev.to.
And luckily, this article got covered on their top page for a few hours:
So far, it generated:
- More than 10,000 views
- 800 reactions
- 200 followers
I guess it's worthwhile to keep cross-posting to it.
Thank you, dev.to.
In this article, I would like to share my thoughts on why it happened.
I hope it's helpful for those who are considering to post articles on dev.to.
TL;DR
- They check new articles carefully
- Contribute first
- Be honest, like talking with a friend
They check new articles carefully
I got the first like by the staff from dev.to. That usually happens when you posted an article. And I always consider this is an automated like which is one of the growthhacks to let people post more. But I guess I was wrong. It seems like they are actually reading every article and considering if it's worth featuring on their top page. So, you can expect they are actually humans, not a bot.
Contribute first
Let me get straight to the point - All you have to do is to make contributions for them first.
You may think like "Well, let's sign up and start cross-posting some articles. Then, they will feature one of them if they liked?".
No, I guess they wouldn't.
dev.to is a developer community.
Think as if you are a community manager.
What kind of people would you like?
What kind of posts would you like to display on the top page?
They don't like people who only pitch their product.
They don't like people who just take page views from their website and quickly leave from it.
You have to do completely the reverse.
In other words, be a giver.
Make some contribution for them first in order to get a return gift from them.
I registered an account 2 years ago, so I was not a new user on dev.to when started cross-posting.
I already have 8 posts and made 15,000 views.
For example:
It is not a cross-post from my own blog.
It has got 4,200 views.
I didn't expect any return from the community.
I was merely sharing what I learned.
Yeah, it's small, but I guess I helped the community grow a little bit :)
Again, be a giver.
Be honest, like talking with a friend
A small tip for attracting people in writing - Be honest and straightforward.
You don't have to shout out what you did.
People are tired of such clickbaits.
That may increase some views but people will not become your audience.
So, do not focus on numbers.
I hope it's helpful for those who are considering to post articles on dev.to.
And I hope the dev.to community grows more!
Top comments (8)
great points
I would just add that it's totally OK in my opinion to start your first post by cross posting something you already wrote before.
this is what I did myself
getting started is hard
you have no idea what to expect, whether you will like writing here, how your article will be received, how the unfamiliar interface works, what you should write about.
So keep it simple and copy paste something you already wrote before.
Also, having a topic that is very broad and that everyone can follow will drum up a lot of interest and likely get pinned.
The majority of people here are developers, and I would wager all of them dream of having a site that sits there and makes them passive income. Even on hacker news the articles that start with "How I made something that makes me $xxxx/mo" hit the front page constantly.
Contrast that with my latest post about the intricacies of deploying C# apps to a niche corner of Azure. That is highly unlikely to get 30k views and 1k reactions. Which is not my goal, just using that for comparison.
There are a lot of people here that share their knowledge, there's nothing what you did that makes that any different from most with one exception. You covered something that is not the norm for most to cover and that got you attention and a pin.
Thanks for sharing the deep secret to getting promoted 😉. These kind of tips always end up with buckle down and do the work. There is no magic pill to get to the top of any social platform, it always involves doing the work. Any sort of hack is typically short lived.
Ahh, the secrets of the Dev Community, unleashed. 😂
Jokes aside, those are some great insights! Thanks for sharing. 😊
I just landed across this article and a must say, this are some really helpful insights, basic yet informative. I will try to implement it and expand the community on dev.to as well!
Great Blog.
Great points and thanks for sharing! Congrats on the success as well.
I recently got a trending post too. :) Thanks for the tips.