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How can I make my posts more discoverable?

Jérémie Astor on September 16, 2020

I'm asking this because my last post reached almost nobody. While most of the stuff I've been writing here is obviously low quality, I feel this pa...
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ender_minyard profile image
ender minyard • Edited

Hi Jérémie! I hope you're having a great day today.

Regarding the post:

  • The most important thing is your topic. If people aren't interested in your topic, they won't read the article. I personally have never heard of Gwion. If you want to introduce people to Gwion, explain what it is and why it matters. Don't assume people know about the topic or are interested.
  • The header image is blurry. Header images are optimized using compression that decreases image quality - you have to upload an extremely clear, large image for the header to look okay, from my experience at least.
  • Sentences in the article are missing periods. It seems low effort because of this. (Some people say my writing is low effort!😔 You can't always tell as a reader)
  • Effort =/= results. Virality is random. Sometimes my articles get hundreds of interactions, sometimes they get twelve. In the end, I hope you're writing for yourself. It's understandable to want an audience but you won't always have one.
  • Just a personal opinion: I wish the article was more visually appealing. I don't know how you would achieve it - maybe diagrams explaining how Gwion works? - but it's not nice to look at and that made me click off, combined with the grammar.

For some reason, cross-posting articles elsewhere has never worked for me. It might work for you though.

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Hmm... Should I always period a title?

Anyways, I am not interested in Gwion, so I might not be tempted to click on it. It didn't appear in my feed in the first place, though.

I am no professional programmer, nor I am optimized for career building (like with React), though; so I cannot really tell.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

(with an accurate documentation)
Yet Gwion might be a good fit for an hobbyist programmer wanting to make music/sound!

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ender_minyard profile image
ender minyard

That’s interesting! I’m looking forward to your next post :-)

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

I probably overlooked the visual aspect, and yes, I can't assume people will know about Gwion!
Thank you.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

well if you make a post about Gwion, you want to

  • Introduce this topic to people
  • show up how to start with that
  • make a tutorial of some kind
  • showing a finished (partial or full) project
  • making a review of it.

If you make a review or a tutorial you must use Gwion because your target is people that already know what it is.
If you are about to introduce a topic you can say "Easy date management with javascript lib" instead on talking about "Date management with Dayjs" for adding some examples (actually I don't know about Gwion TBH)

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

Noted.

Actually this post was more about changing/proposing a new syntax for a programming language than about Gwion specifically. Maybe I could have used a more generic title to make clear that the post was a request of criticism about said syntax.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern
  • Tags! I noticed that other post could have maybe made use of the "showdev" tag or others potentially.
  • If you share it elsewhere to get some interaction, it can help get it early momentum and it will spread a little more. So maybe you have a private space you can ask for comments from? This is totally valid.

And for the most part, if you can write somewhat consistently and gain a few followers, you'll get a bit of natural engagement to help reach more folks.

Hope this helps! There's no silver bullet.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

Accurate and helpful as always, thank you Ben.

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itsjzt profile image
Saurabh Sharma

If it is tech related post on hacker news and relevant subreddits.

If you can, build an email list so you can get repeated visitors.

read some SEO 101 stuff and try to write post which good titles and good searches per month (dont overdo it tho).

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

Seems sensible, thank you.
I don't understand what you mean with the email list, could you expand?

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itsjzt profile image
Saurabh Sharma

Bonus tip: you can post link of your article on twitter tagging dev.to if they retweeted (which they do a lot) you will get good views and hopefully some twitter followers too.

There is a way to ask dev.to to tweet your post but I dont know how effectively it works.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

I don't tweet for now. Maybe I'll consider this at some point. Thanks for the tip anyway!

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itsjzt profile image
Saurabh Sharma

So I currently dont have an email list but the idea is you ask your readers to subscribe to your email newsletters by giving you their email (like you see on all kinds of blogs) then you email them when a new blog comes out, this way you can turn your one time blog visitor to a regular reader.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

Kinda what I had in mind, thanks for the clarification.

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karllhughes profile image
Karl L. Hughes • Edited

I write technical blog posts full-time, so while you probably don't need to take content promotion as seriously as I do, I'd recommend sharing your work. Just publishing to Dev.to alone won't bring in gobs of readers.

Here's my checklist of promotional tactics which might help you out: learn.draft.dev/posts/promotion

The tl;dr is: you should spend at least .5x to 1x times as much time promoting your blog post as you do writing it. Start building an audience on a couple of platforms and leverage existing communities like Reddit and Hacker News.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

I'll read that!
While I think Gwion is a pretty interesting project, and that's why I'm actively seeking contributors, I tend to do what I have to do, but forget to communicate about it in the mean time.

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karllhughes profile image
Karl L. Hughes

Yeah, for sure. At least half of making a project grow is making sure people know about it. I also created this checklist which might help in your case: sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing...

As you can tell, I like checklists, haha.

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Hey in this case it's quite obvious and I agree with what others have said. The blurry cover image gives a bad first impression. But I think the two biggest factors are the topic and the tags. Those tags are just low value and not very searchable other than the discuss one. And the biggest reason for low engagement is the topic Gwion. Not many people even know what it is I had to google it to find out that it is a programming language, aimed at making music. It would have been better if you described what it was for people who don't know because it is not a high engagement topic like Javascript and React for example.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

Share them through your network (linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram and so on) and build a network of connections which tastes or preferences matches your content.

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

That's sensible. At the moment I only use reddit, github and of course dev.to. I might consider expanding that a bit (hoping it can be automated 😄)

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

Of course you can automate what you want if there's an API somewhere 😁
Also check ifttt web app

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fennecdjay profile image
Jérémie Astor

I'll do, thanks.