First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR 100 FOLLOWERS. It's the most number of followers I have on ANY platform - 61 on twitter, 30 on Github - I'm really grateful to Dev.to and all the amazing people here who liked, commented, saved and shared my blogs! I've made a lot of friends in such a short time here. Anyways ;
How I got to 100 followers, in 10 days.
This is kinda a funny story. I (re)discovered dev.to from my google news feed. The funny part is, I discovered that I already had an account here 😂. I had forgotten about it, because "I'll never blog anyway". Well, that didn't age well 🤣
Clearly, this changed. Just writing blogs is such a good experience, and all the people i've met, all the people who have DMed me on Twitter, encouraged me to keep going, it's all worth it, also for future me
Writing the blogs
Basically speaking, Don't stress about it. Literally nobody cares about that one spelling mistake you made, or that your opinion is completely different; Don't think about what others will think.
Don't stress yourself by saying "I'll only write the BEST blogs so that the person reading it will think highly of me". That's not true. Most people enjoy reading about the journey, the experience, the simplest of projects are a part of the journey. the smallest of your thoughts that you think should be shared, are worth sharing. TLDR; Don't stress about it.
Tags
I recently also learnt how important tags are over here. If you have the correct tag, you can get featured on one of Dev's twitter accounts (The Python dev, The Rust dev, The Docker dev, etc.)
Not only that, adding appropriate tags makes it easier to find your blogs
Blog for yourself.
Always, blog for yourself. If no one else is reading your blog, future YOU surely will. In fact, I'm already reading my own blogs on Making the conway's game of life in python to find out how to use pylab colormesh
What to write?
Types of blogs
There are 4 types of blogs you can write (broadly) :
- Tutorial blogs
- Showing off a project
- Writing about good technologies (like websites, cheatsheets, VScode extensions)
- and finally, general blogs about thoughts on a programming language
I have tried all of these types of blogs, and inevitably, some tend to perform better than others. However you should always just write what you feel like writing (ofcourse) and NOT care about how well the blog will do here.
Tutorial Blogs
Tutorial blogs are really nice, but the retention is really low. You should always try to keep your blogs as short as you can, and only go over the logic, since the code is the easy part (in my opinion).
Like today I posted this tutorial on how to use Docker - It's doing really well, because I think I managed to keep it short, concise and informative
https://dev.to/dhravya/docker-explained-to-a-5-year-old-2cbg
Project show-offs
Project show offs are the Best performing because they take the least time to read and are interesting to all the audience. I had posted some projects here, and almost all of them did really well
Introducing Cakecutter
And here's my best one yet. 3000 views, absolutely blew up
Create README files for your project in 30 seconds ⚡
as you might have noticed, I use emojis and assert that this won't take much of your time ("in 30 seconds")
This seems to make it more reachable to all audiences, i don't know how
Writing about technologies
I also try to write about interesting stuff i discover on the internet, tools / softwares I use. People seem to like reading these too. (There are a lot, and i mean a LOT of VScode extensions blogs out there. all of them do really well)
These are also the easiest to write. Here are some blogs of mine:
https://blog.dhravya.dev/is-this-the-future-of-web/
https://dev.to/dhravya/how-to-supercharge-your-terminal-with-starship-klj
https://dev.to/dhravya/how-to-add-autocomplete-to-powershell-in-30-seconds-2a8p
All of them did really well too
General blogs (Opinions, announcements, challenges)
General blogs are also really good, because it's just like IRL conversations. Just a [16] years old dude giving his thoughts over a thing
Why I'm learning Rust (and you should, too) and Is this the future of web? are the only 2 general blogs i've written, and both did decently well.
That's pretty much it.
TL;DR of this entire blog:
- Don't stress about your content
- Write for yourself
- What to write in blogs, and how I wrote them
If you liked this blog, make sure to 💖 it. If you ESPECIALLY liked it, make sure to follow me. Bye!
Top comments (6)
"Write for yourself" 💖💖
I agree that we should all write for ourselves. Yes, we want to produce well written content that is desirable to our audience. That takes time and practice. You will learn by doing it. It's easy to begin and fun when you get noticed and receive comments on your articles. Keep up the good work! 😎
I agree! I'm glad there were only 6 people reading my blogs when I started out 😂
Lots of great points. The DEV twitter accounts are so good for boosting your articles engagement.
From a selfish perspective, this is a great idea 🎉
From the community perspective, we have to navigate through hundreds of duplicate and/or "light" content before finding actual solutions to our daily problems 😔
That one with the finest performance is going to be my first...