What's the best way to promote a Medium article to developers?
I recently published a Medium article that looks at the two thousand TODO comments in the Kubernetes' source code, as a means of showcasing my project and also (hopefully) surfacing some interesting information (the average age of a TODO comment in that code is over 2 years). https://medium.com/@augmentable/looking-at-kubernetes-2k-todo-comments-b2db42dc7fdb
What are good ways to get this post in front of more developers? I've posted it on reddit and twitter, but am interested in figuring out more ways to get it in front of people who may be interested in the content. Would love to know any ideas if people have them!
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Try removing the article from the paywall.
🤣 It's funny how medium has become a paywall mess just so that a handful of writers can make thousands $, many a few dozen $, and most just a few cents.
It's good if you have a decent following and write regularly, but if you are struggling with traffic and add a paywall to your content then there's no point in writing on medium.
content marketing isnt easy but can create so much traffic. first you need to create many posts not just one and try to hit jackpot every time. with more posts you have just more bets.
then learn writing click-baity titles with strong words. read buzzfeed and reddit for a day to understand what works what does not + that subtle click-baity-ness should be preferred.
re you post title: it's just descriptive and tells me ok he somehow scanned k8s' source code but didn't found anything particular. stopped reading left.
and you have already two so called "strong words" => kubernetes + 2000
examples (Strong words big)
popular click-bait titles are "What I learned when reading 2000 todo comments in the KUBERNETES code base"
or
"What I learned when SCRAPING 2000 todo comments in the KUBERNETES code base"
i personally dont like this "what i learned" click-bait bc it's a known click-bait tactic. but it still works very well, just check HN
just from the top of my mind some ideas which are not good and there are better ones out if you spend more time on them
"KUBERNETES ROADMAP is BURIED in 2.000 TODO comments"
"KUBERNETES MAINTAINERS STOPPED using Github Issues, they prefer 2000 TODO comments" then you have of course to admit in the first lines of the post that your title is irony and click-bait but you couldnt resist; this would be better for a tweet because it lacks keeping a q unanswered => 'what do i get if i read that article', it's not easy but yeah you'll get there
Developers absolutely hate that kind of titles.
Your advice is good for many segments, but for reaching developers it really isn't.
man, these were just examples I made up in seconds as examples for subtle click-bait with strong words. OF COURSE this needs to be adapted for OPs use case and no i think even devs are not immune to click-blait.
and the 'how i learned' which I dont like is again very popular with devs: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+I+learned
happy xmas
Contact David Smooke on Hackernoon and see if you can cross post on that platform. I've done that with a lot of my technical blog posts and got some fantastic traction and response from that community.
Post it on Linkedin groups of interest. Search for questions on Quora, Stackoverflow etc that your post is an answer to. Hit your favorite newsletters and ask for inclusion. Same can be done with Slack channels.
Why would anybody care that you "looked at 2000 todo comments" ?
If you would have found something interesting, i trust that you would have put it to title. But you didn't [edit: hence the reader assumes that you didn't find anything interesting, and doesn't even read the article].
And your conclusion is longer than than your main content.
I'd just consider it a learning experience and move to next. And for next make sure you write something that is interesting to developers.
I'm sorry you don't find it very interesting! I think the conclusion of TODO comments being fairly old (over 2 years) is interesting and confirms what a lot of developers intuitively know. I'm sorry you didn't find the other reflections interesting either.
The article just made it to the slashdot homepage and they rephrased the title a bit to make it a bit more captivating: https://slashdot.org/story/19/12/22/183214/many-of-kubernetes-2000-todo-comments-appear-to-be-forgotten
Maybe there'll be something in the next article that grabs you!
They didn't "rephrase the title a little", but rewrote it to hell of a lot more interesting! That's what professionals do i guess :)
Also in that format the article's essential point is easily digestible, but in your original medium post it was really hard to scan. Lot to learn from the pros..
Great job, and good that you didn't listen to my advice! :)
I think you could liven up the writing to make it more scannable, exciting, sharable...
As for places, if you can hit Slashdot that would be an achievement that creates tons of views... Possibly even contending would get you some reads..
I forget what the FAQ site that seems like a search gravity thing for technical questions?..
Possibly find blogs of people that are into deep code reviews and such and try to reach out?..
Thanks, I didn't think of Slashdot! And that's good advice on the article, next time around I'm planning to break up the text a bit more and possibly add some charts
Maybe an infographic..
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.