Top 5 easy tips to get more views 😎🕵️‍♂️

Photo by Olga Stalska on Unsplash

Obviously:

1. make it a "top 5" post
2. make it a "top 10" post
3. make it a "top 20" post
4. make it a "top 50" post
5. make it a "top [whatever]" post

But seriously

Just out of curiosity: what makes them so popular?
I really like dev.to and the content is great. I'm also totally not against top [whatever] posts, I just don't get the immense popularity of them. So since I'm a very curious developer I thought, why not ask 😊 Please let me know in the comments!

Comments

[Syed Faraaz Ahmad]

Even though I think there are way too many of these, if you see the top posts this week, month or year they're almost always lists of things.

• "Top 10 ways to improve your app performance"
• "100 CSS animations to do this"
• "10 useful web development tools to do that"

I think they provide good value in condensed form, but IMO they are overused and a lot of the times repetitive. So if your only goal is to get views, maybe try making a post like this, just know that I wont click on it.

Personally, I just try to write the best possible post I can. If it's good enough, people will like it, share it and it'll become popular. If it doesn't get popular (which is most of the time), oh well! I'll be content with just giving good info to a handful of people.

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

I think they provide good value in condensed form, but IMO they are overused and a lot of the times repetitive. So if your only goal is to get views, maybe try making a post like this, just know that I wont click on it.

Definitly not what I'm aiming for! My goal is sharing my joy in development!

Personally, I just try to write the best possible post I can. If it's good enough, people will like it, share it and it'll become popular. If not (which is most of the time), oh well! I'll be content with just giving good info to a handful of people.

Same here 😊

[jeikabu]

Definitely agree with the first two.

Regarding popular tags, take a look at: dev.to/tags
There's also moderators that apparently can raise the visibility of your posts (potentially increasing views): dev.to/community-moderation#using-...
So, writing "high-quality" articles may net you some moderator love.

External referrals also seem to count, so basic SEO may have an impact. You can see more detailed stats for each post on your dashboard (you may need to click the ellipsis).

[Mike Ekkel]

It's 100% the title. There's a ton of tips out there to help you boost your blog and one of them is creating a tangible title. Making a "top 5" or "X ways to improve Y" makes it very explicit to the reader what to expect.

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

So I'm letting a lot of readers down by not giving them what they expect with this post😉

SORRY! 😘

Good explanation! Thank you

[Let's Code]

I can speak with my experience on youtube so far. The main reason is audience retention. As a content creator, we want viewers to stick around until the last number of the TOP as the video doesn't get promoted to viewers if the content doesn't get watched more than 50% I think at least.

I just published a youtube video a couple of days ago that has the word TOP look at the title 😊 I am quite not very sure now if you are talking about me LOL.

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

Thanks for sharing! Just talking about post here in general 😊

[Let's Code]

ok definitely. some people are lazy to read and losing their interest too quickly

they want something quick but concise

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

Hey Amelia!
Thanks for the clarification 😊

One thing I know for sure: anything web dev (be it plain JS or React or MERN or whatever) will get a ton of attention. Everything else tends to get buried (in my experience) 🤷🏻‍♀️

That's also my experience, but it seems (didn't check) that the "top [whatever]" lists also get more likes related to other articles with the same tags. It just triggers me so much... and then I just have to know why 🕵️ 😉

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

So curious what this post is going to do. If you're right it will probably get a lot of views but not that much likes. What in turn means it will have less views in the long run I guess...

It's a good experiment I think 🧪🥼

[Shaquil Maria]

Thank you for the post. I learned a lot about how to get more views on my articles, 10 /10 I will read another post.

But seriously, this seems to be a trend lately for everything development-related, and when you open them it's about web dev. I think it can be summarized into these top 3 points:

• Most people want a long article
• Most wants a simple list of steps to follow to achieve greatness
• The path of least resistance. The easiest something is portrayed to be, the more attention it gets

[Jesus The Hun]

Top 3 of reasons these posts work :

• They are expected to be short
• They are expected to do some curation for you
• They are expected to give you crowd wisdom

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

The last one is dangerous because it usually isn't crowd wisdom. Please keep thinking on your own! 😊

[Jesus The Hun]

Well we've just found a new reason : controversy :D

[SnowCode]

According to me the reason is because those posts are very easy to produce and easy to read. There isn't a great amount of text on those pages, you can easily skim through the headlines.

Also they are well known marketing strategies people reproduce without always noticing.

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

you have to be a genius to become a developer 😉
(think I read it somewhere.. 🕵️‍♂️)

A compilation of misconceptions non-tech people have about devs (part 2 of 2) 😞

Amelia Vieira Rosado ・ Apr 2 ・ 3 min read

#watercooler #writing #technoglot

😊 🤣

[Let's Code]

dev.to or other blogging viewers like a summary not a book.

TLDR - give me the details in bullet points and few lines to go with it perhaps

[🐤🥇 Jasper de Jager]

and the road to get there is at least as important as the result. I think a developer that really loves programming is more interested in the why than the how, but that's me 😁