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Where to start with developer content

Getting the word out

Hacker News

When it comes to marketing, specifically to developers, the most common question is how do I get on Hacker News? The second most commong is, well in addition to there what matters. This fully depends on your audience, and if you really only care about the former versus the broader issue of creating a sustainable model for circulating your content then just read these links then move on. If you want a full model for getting your content out there then keep reading.

More than just Hacker News

First off don’t get me wrong, HN can provide a great surge of short term traffic. There’s a few problems I have with this though. To begin with it gives you one shot to get your message perfect, if you have the wrong message, miss your call to action, or forget an affiliate link then you get your 15k viewers well you get no second shot at it. Though more interestingly and a bit of gut feel, I’ve noticed that traffic contains more bounes and lower engagement. And then theres the issue that its definitely not a science to getting on there….

Other news sites

Of course theres other news sites, ones of relevance include reddit, dzone, monacle. I’ve found each of these can be similar in some ways to hacker news. Yet, they have a bit longer of a shelf life, giving me a slightly higher propensity to give them some attention. At the same time they also have a smaller reach.

Twitter

Twitter is yet another method that can work quite well. Observations of it include lower traffic than something like a hacker news, and equal to better engagement overall. Perhaps the most interesting piece I find is that you’ll often get more intelligent and also positive discussion on twitter vs. HN. There is one huge fail I find with twitter that nearly every company commits. The author of the post or company twitter handle posts it, then 10 people proceed to retweet it within 10 minutes. The problem with this if you’re anything like places I’ve worked at is you have a strong overlap of followers, this combined with the empheral nature of twitter means you’re diminishing reach. Instead having a few people (dont make it a strict requirement) retweet later in the day can help broaden your reach.

Google Plus

I’m slightly ashamed to be including this on here… I don’t use it, I don’t care for it, etc. I have no hard evidence of this either, but publishing on Google Plus seems to speed up Google’s indexing of the article to be much closer to instant. Take it for what you will.

Email

That thing you still get too much of is a great way of getting content out.

Long tail

Please please please do not underestimate the value in the long tail of your content. Google sends me between 200 and 500 new uniques a day due to various articles. Think about the areas you want to rank for and create your content for them, work on getting it out and syndicated, then