Christmas gift
My partner @ymc9 and I have been writing posts in Dev.to weekly since 3 months ago. Mostly, the views count of the post would be around several hundred, few got more than 1k views. As the holiday approaches, the gift we wish to get is to reach 1k views for our last posts of the year.
@ymc9 published the below post first :
Then I published another post:
A gift can be a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.
The view count for the two posts until now(Jan 3, 2022) are:
- 45,861
- 20,991
Find Santa
After Yiming’s post reached 10k views within 3 days, we thought it was mainly because the title is the typical eye-catching one that some top-ranked posts have. Of course, the content speaks for itself, as Yiming shows great insight into Typescript in the post, which you can see the evidence from the comments and the more than 800 reactions it got.
In comparison, my post is just a simple journey of my experience using ChatGTP to resolve a specific coding issue without much insight. You might think it is because of the hot topic of ChatGPT. I think that’s just a small factor as there are already many ChatGTP-related posts in Dev.to, many of which I think are more interesting and very insightful.
One of the most effective ways to find the clue from the rough number is to Drill Down. Dev.to really only give a very limited data dashboard, which I really hope they could enhance in the feature. Luckily enough, along the only direction provided, we could find Santa:
Santa is SEO
Why? The traffic coming from Google are way more than it comes from the Dev.to directly.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of SEO, if you would like a heuristic, think of how many different ways your post could appear in the search result of the possible words people search. The more general the words are, the more view counts you could possibly get.
How Yiming’s post got found
If people want to learn more about Typescript, there is a good chance they would search “how to become a better typescript programmer” on Google. You can see Yiming’s post appears as the second result(As Google now shows the personalized result, you might see a different result as mine, but you would probably still see it on the first screen):
Actually, if you search “better typescript programmer” it even appears at the top:
Moreover, people could also search for “typescript programmer tips”, which is still there.
How my post got found
If people want to know how to use ChatGPT to solve coding issues, they probably will search “chatgpt how to solve coding issues”, and my post would appear as the top result:
For more general keywords, “chatgpt coding issues”, they can still see my post. Although their original intention might not be relevant to my post, it is still possible that they click and check my post.
Extra bonus
If you write posts yourself, you probably know there is a common “one-week” pattern across media platforms, including Dev.to. It usually means the impression time for your post only last one week, or in other words, your post will get few views after the first week like the below chart:
However, if your post has a good SEO, you could probably break the pattern and get the below chart:
From this point of view, you can literally think of Google as the Engine. Even when the platform won’t provide you with any fuel, Google is there like a solar engine to give you energy every day. 😄
The tip
SEO itself is a complicated discipline. It combines a large number of tools and best practices that evolve occasionally. There is even the job role as SEO specialist. Therefore, the only tip I could give is based on my own experience:
Always keep in mind how people could see your post using Google search, and make sure the most possible words appear in your title.
That’s why I changed the title to the current one instead of the original, more attractive one, “The secret that helps you get more than 10k views” 😁
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Top comments (8)
Could you name a reason why someone in the community would strive for more views? I thought writing here was more about high-quality, clear, organised and visually appealing content that is helpful for others…
I totally agree with you that we are here to write “more about high-quality, clear, organised and visually appealing content that is helpful for others…”.
The reason is simple, to get more views is to be able to help more people.
IMO, the old quote “good content speaks for itself” is not as applicable as before in this information explosion era, without thinking about how to reach more people, you might end up wasting the good content. 😅
It's a sad state of affairs when you have to twist your content, and do stuff like add clickbait headings in order to make it more visible - this is the job of SEO experts who are trying to drive conversions to make sales... not something to be worried about by writers who believe they have something interesting to say, without ulterior motives, and say it in their own way - not wrangled into SEO friendly dirge.
I strongly believe better content curation by Dev.to would be beneficial in this regard - but people always tend to push back against it because "everyone deserves a voice" and "you're talking about making us into elitist gatekeepers"...
It's a tricky balance to be sure, but Dev.to over the years has become increasingly drowned in content that is either: poorly written, repetitive, badly tagged, copied, done as a homework assignment, written just for the sake of producing more content, or - more recently - AI generated. This is bad for Dev.to, bad for its writers, and bad for its readers.
I agree with you that motivation matters. If the intention is to share something interesting or helpful to others, then it should be fine to try to spread it to more people as that’s the intrinsic characteristic of the information.
Regarding SEO, I think the premise of it is good content that could really be helpful for people. Otherwise, whatever tricks you use, won’t help at all. Tricks like clickbait might increase impressions at first but is detrimental to SEO fundamentally as SEO is in fact the long-term strategy for better content curation instead of the short-term objective for Ads.
My whole point is, we should write for people - not search engines. It's ass-backwards
Ok. Then my point is we write for people, and we could utilize search engine to make more people see. 😄
I agree with @jonrandy that editor curation is a better solution for the discoverability of good content.
I've been writing on Medium as well, and to be honest, it's a much more pleasant platform both for the authors and the readers. Its curation and publications seem to be effective. But a cold start on Medium seems significantly harder than on Dev.to.
I see your point! I agree with the fact that there is an explosion of content, hence it is more difficult to find good quality content.
But I think that as long as you gather a community and write high quality content, more people who are genuinely interested will join. But I don’t deny it is nice when we go and see our follower count growing 🙃