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In 11 months of writing I have amassed over 250k views on DEV, not to be sniffed at...but I can do better!
In this article I will share:
- my content stats with you for the last 11 months
- some analysis I did and never released on when to post on DEV
- and my (ambitious) content creation plans for 2022!
Hopefully you will find the writing stats interesting or when to post on DEV if you are a content creator, but if you don't create content / aren't interested in that you can skip to my plans for the year here as I am sure you will find that interesting!
Contents
- 2021 in review
- When to post on DEV (release time matters)
-
2022 the year of series!
- Ultimate UI
- WCAG in Plain English
- Conversion Rate Optimisation
- 1000 days to £1million
- Round Up!
2021 in review
So I started writing in February 2021, so these are stats for 11 months as a complete beginner!
Views
Although views don't really tell you much (as I could have just written a load of pandering listicles) it is still an interesting number to see.
And I am not going to lie, hitting quarter of a million views did bring a smile to my face.
I could easily have doubled that number if I had written to a schedule but overall it was a good first few months as a content creator and it let me "find my voice" (which is apparently angry, sarcastic and mean! 🤣)
But how much effort did it take to hit those numbers?
Number of posts
83 posts...not too shabby. Although I will admit a lot of them were silly posts.
But for every post released I also have loads of draft posts that didn't make the cut!
Yikes, 98 unpublished posts! Some are almost complete too but I either didn't like what I had written or just didn't have the motivation to finish the article as it didn't appeal to me.
One job for this week is to rescue the posts that were nearly complete and just finish them, just because I didn't love them doesn't mean that someone else won't find them useful!
So going back to my released articles, that means that with 83 posts and 270k views the average number of views for each of my posts is 3,274. Not too bad, but I could certainly improve that (more on that later).
Comments
The one that surprised me was number of comments. 1820 comments in 11 months? I spend too much time here (seriously, one of the things I will be changing in 2022)!
What would be good to see is how many of those comments were on my own posts. I could probably work that out using the forem API but I don't think I will bother as it is just curiosity!
All I know is that although i enjoyed writing essays in the comments (seriously some of my comments are 2000+ words!) it is not a very productive use of my time so I need to stop that.
Badges
Badges are pretty pointless and if you are a new writer do not place as much emphasis on them as I did.
At first I thought it was really cool when you got a new badge but now I realise that most of the time the "achievement" is quite empty and down to luck in some ways.
But I might as well share my badges for the year.
So we have the CSS3, Top 7, 4 week streak, 8 week streak, 16 week streak, accessibility and beloved comment badges.
As I said, the gamification aspect of the badges makes them feel special at first, but in reality they don't tell you much about the quality of your content.
Last but not least, interactions
The one stat that has a little meaning to me is interactions. It does at least give me some idea of if people like a particular piece of content.
So yet again the average reactions per article is roughly 83 (weird, 83 articles with an average of 83 reactions - perhaps that is my new lucky number, but either way there is something pleasing about having a square number! 🤣).
But that isn't particularly useful on its own, what I look at is reactions per view.
So by doing this I can see which posts have the most engagement from the DEV community.
My most popular post (reactions wise) is also the post with the most reactions per view.
It makes sense as that article was a monstrous and high effort posts so that does make it worth it (even if the view count was a lot lower than I would have liked at 8859 views.)
Still it is the top accessibility article for the year and in the top 5 for all time so I am happy with that.
The one thing I certainly learned that I haven't covered yet is:
When to post on DEV (Release time matters)
Over the last year I tended to just release content whenever it was finished. This was my first big mistake!
Although it is a little out of date (I did the analysis in June) I did analyse the best times to release articles for likes on DEV so I thought I would share that with you finally!
What I did was download every article that was live on DEV (yup, 250k+ articles for a total of 10.6GB at the time!), which includes the like counts and release date etc.
Then I discounted the top and bottom 5% number of likes to account for outliers / over-achievers / under-achievers.
Then I looked at the publish time and collated the data together into sections in the table.
All the times are GMT and you can certainly see some interesting patterns.
So the best times to release articles are:
- Monday at either 1am, 11am or 5pm
- Tuesday at 1pm or 4pm
- Wednesday at 12pm
- Thursday at 9am
- Friday - you shouldn't release
- Saturday - you shouldn't release
- Sunday - 6am (top time to release!)
The worst time to release is Friday at midnight!
If you write here on DEV I hope that is useful for you so you can tune your release times for maximum impact!
For me personally one of the big wins / changes for the year is to write articles and then "sit on them" until the prime time to release them.
So my release schedule starting 09th January 2021 is going to be:
- Sunday at 6am
- Tuesday at 1pm
- Wednesday at 12pm
- Thursday at 9am
As I plan on writing 4 articles a week!
Which leads me nicely on to...
2022 the year of series!
I have decided that the best way to focus my writing while making it easier for people to read stuff that they find interesting is to write some mega series!
Here is what is coming this year!
Ultimate UI
75+ UI components that are "perfect". Covering performance, accessibility, progressive enhancement, backwards compatibility and more!
Read the introduction to the series here:
Article No Longer Available
WCAG in Plain English
Another mega series!
This time I am going to tackle one of the biggest barriers to people building accessible applications and websites...the complexity of WCAG (the guidelines around accessibility).
I am hoping to make 2022 the year of semantic HTML and accessibility and this is just my way of making accessibility more approachable.
You can read more about the WCAG in plain English series in the following introduction:
Article No Longer Available
Conversion Rate Optimisation
The third mega series!
In this series I explore the exciting world of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), helping turn visitors into customers or mailing lists subscribers etc!
I am hoping I can help people see the difference between "pretty" and "effective" when it comes to UX design!
You can read more about the CRO series in the following introduction:
Article No Longer Available
1000 days to £1million
The 4th and final part of this "year of series" is more of a general series on taking a business from £0 to £1million!
I will be sharing how I am optimising my time (so I can create all these series!), producing an MVP, launching a product and raising capital for the product to reach my goal of £1million turnover by 01/09/2024!
This series will have loads of little tips and tricks for time management and optimising your work day so it will be worth following for that!
But even if that doesn't interest you it will probably be interesting to see how the Ultimate UI series and WCAG in English series are part of a much bigger plan!
Think of it like a weekly roundup of what I have been working on and a curated public journal of what I have been up to personally!
Oh and in case you are wondering where this is all leading...
I am building a site builder / CMS...that has to make the article worth a read just to see why I would do something so stupid! 🤣
You can read my introduction to the idea here if this interests you (it is a little long, future entries will be better structured and shorter!):
Article No Longer Available
Round Up!
Over 250 articles planned:
- 76 for Ultimate UI
- 89 for WCAG in plain English
- 68 for Conversion Rate Optimisation
- 52 for 1000 days to £1million
I don't think there is much else I need to say other than - I better get cracking on writing!
Oh there is one more thing I forgot to mention...I will be releasing some YouTube shorts / Tik Toks for WCAG and Conversion Rate Optimisation so if you prefer quick summaries rather than in-depth articles they might be right up your street!
Oh and one more thing - I have 3 EPIC guides planned on images, forms and performance similar to my mega article on accessibility:
Article No Longer Available
Top comments (34)
out of my curiosity: how did you download the articles from devto?
I didn't find any endpoint to download all the contents :)
I cycled through each article ID up until the current latest ID (which at the time was about 650k if I remember correctly).
It also took over 20 days from what I remember so as to not hit the service too hard all at once I throttled it to 10 per minute out of courtesy.
Of course there will be no "take every single piece of content on the site in one go" API endpoint 🤣🤣💗
ahhhhh I just figured out that the id is a sequential key! :D
cool :D
I want to hear what you have planned for 2022!
Any exciting projects or ideas you are working on?
Oh and thanks for reading this (and my other articles I just released if you have read them), have (another) ❤ and 🦄 to show my appreciation!
Thanks for sharing your insights!
I don't "sit" on many posts, so I have to make an effort to create new ones, but I will keep doing so and make them shorter and don't strive for perfection to prevent wasting time.
Today, on a Tuesday at two o'clock CET (should have been 1 p.m. in England, so a magically ideal time for publishing an article), I added this animated gradient text color tutorial to my new What's next in CSS? article series.
I also summarized my reflections about the past and the upcoming year: Nothing New in 2022?. Some of the text might sound familiar for those who read my posts on devrant as well (sorry, no link to that!)
Besides doing more (project) work to pay my bills and prepare for the summer, I want to continue learning and side projects (Symfony, MERN stack, and even more CSS) and hopefully be able to concentrate more on working together with charitable non-profit organizations and "green" (eco-friendly) startups.
I wish you a lot of success with your amibitious plans!
Already read your gradient text article 😁 Loved it!
Sounds like a really interesting year, hope you get to work with the right type of companies! 💪
Off to read the "nothing New in 2022" article as I missed that I think, I am sure I will enjoy it like all your other articles!
Happy new year bud!
This is so inspiring ❤
Thanks so much Emmanuil ❤,
Do you have any big (or small) plans for 2022?
I plan to up the pace of my dev writing this year.
Have some great article ideas, just need to stop procrastinating and start writing 😋
I struggle with this also so don't worry!
The only tip I have is to put time in the diary for it and treat it like an appointment. Once you start writing the "oh I enjoy this" part kicks in and you can get it done 💪
Thats a great idea. Cheers!
A couple of people have done the "best time to post" thing over the years. I don't really like it: if people all pile on the best time (and by best we mean quantity of views here) then it'll change. The feed will become swamped and your masterpiece will go unread.
It is why I didn't release the original article, but I wanted to share it as it took me 15 DAYS to download all that data via the API.
And that is when i download all the data again and rerun to find the new best times 😉 (kidding)
With all of the experiments going on with the feed at the moment the data is also less relevant now anyway, but I thought it was interesting to see when people were reading (second table in the link is more relevant for that).
More than anything it is a good excuse to set myself specific times to release articles and if it helps just a little then it is worth it!
Your plans are so inspiring and useful too.
I am pushing myself to make accessible components but I am lazy.
I am rooting for you from here...looking forward for the wonderful content.
All the best!!
Thanks Neha, I will be seeking your feedback on things! 😄
I will be following you...😊
Thanks Kiran, same for you now you are back creating content 👍
Hopefully the WCAG in plain English will help with the accessibility stuff we were discussing (part of the reason I chose to write that series is from our chat!)❤️
Yes, but you could mention my name 😂, I will go through the article more detail tomorrow. All the best for your future projects.
Thanks for sharing the data about publishing time. I usually post on Wednesdays, but slightly later than the optimal time of day you mentioned. I'll post a bit earlier this week and see how it goes 🙏
Same lol, hence why I am focusing on not doing that going forward! 🤣
Hi @grahamthedev , long time no see. Hope you are doing fine. Any chance to expect some end-of-the-year post here on DEV?
This is awesome, thanks InHu!
Thanks for the support Theodorus! ❤️