Blogging for Devs

Thanks Florin 🤗

thanks jatin! glad you're part of it :)

Hey Julian! Yeah it's interesting, on the one hand I am passionate about dissolving these severe misunderstandings about SEO developers seem to have.

At the same time -- it would make the landscape more competitive, so it feels like a well-kept secret 😂

At least in the software and programming niche, there is so much opportunity. It's wild when you're using to hanging out in more competitive SERPs.

It's not $10K per month, but about $1K per month.

I shared a bit below about where the expenses come from (lots of tools + paying guests) but happy to chat if you have questions on top of that, John!

Hey Sean! Nice to see you here & thanks for the encouragement. Hope everything is going awesome for you ^_^

Thank you Falak!

Thank you Matt :)

Thanks Davis! It's been cool to see your community grow as well ^_^

Hey Marlon! TL;DR - Yes, there are a lot of expenses involved with running a community, in part because I'm running recorded, virtual events.

Tech is a few hundred bucks (Circle and ConvertKit are $99 each per month, then more tools I pay annually, like Ahrefs, Vimeo Pro, Otter.ai, Zoom Webinars, Adobe Creative Suite, etc). It adds up very quickly.

But I'm also inviting expert guests to join for livestreamed AMAs, and they are all paid. Doing two guest sessions per month + the tools easily gets me to $1K or more.

Does that clarify? I could also just do it with 100% material made by me, but I'm not an expert on everything, I think bringing in more perspectives makes the community more valuable.

Wow thanks Dmitrii, was not expecting this :) You actually were one of the first people I was sure I wanted as a member based on our email exchanges.

I'm really excited to see how your blog develops during your journey of building in public over the next year!

Thanks Thiago, glad you'll be a part of it :) Excited to follow what you and Stefanni are up to!

Hey Davis, seen your community too. I'm a big SEO geek but know nothing about local SEO! Seems like you are on a super promising trajectory to monetize soon :) Interested to hear how it goes for you!

Thanks for being Member #1, Dom! And joining the welcoming committee 🥳

thanks john!

thanks so much jim, all the best with your course!!

Thanks Brent! It's a custom theme on top of Circle, integrated with a website built with Firebase and Material UI. But the main discussions UI and what you're probably asking about is Circle: https://circle.so

Thanks Andre! Means a lot coming from a marketer :D

Thanks Jamie!

It's a combination of things, but the main thing I'm using is Circle: https://circle.so

It's heavily integrated into my website via API and I use a custom OAuth provider to enable a single set of login credentials between the two "sites".

Thanks Dominique, appreciate the support :)

Hey there - this question is super long, but I cannot find a reasonable way to answer it without writing something even longer :)

I'll just put a bit about how I'm approaching this, which I hope will answer your main questions:

My focus is on building a community with a strong positive, constructive, and learning-focused culture which includes both total beginners and seasoned experts.

The value proposition is not that I'm going to make tons of fancy content, although I plan to add it -- I'll be focusing on quality over frequency. For the audience, developers, it's fine -- they are blogging in their free time and don't need to read a 10,000 word guide to X every week.

Re: Learning the same stuff anywhere on the internet. Well, you can't. That's why my newsletter became so popular. No one (in terms of developers) who doesn't rely primarily on Twitter for blog traffic has ever really covered these topics. I'm filling a "gap".

The value proposition is accountability, inspiration, quality and thoughtful feedback, meeting and learning from successful bloggers you otherwise wouldn't connect with, and helping the next generation of great tech content creators. And you get to have this discussion in a quality environment, free of spam and shameless self-promotion, because people pay to be there.

My role is to reinvest in the community. I can do that by paying community members to do expert livestreams and AMAs. I can do that by writing original content and running workshops. I can do that by giving them in-depth feedback, or tagging other experts in the community who know more about a topic than me.

I hope that makes sense how I approach it!

P.S. No problem with lurkers :) Only people who do hit-and-run self-promotion. What people eventually learn is the more you help others, the more they want to help you. Who would've thought!

Thanks Rodney :)

Why would that be unlikely?

I have a lifetime plan for $180, and an annual plan for $96. Most people chose those options.

She said that 11 people signed up in the same day she sent the emails, not that she only have 11 paying users in total.

So glad we met Stefanni!

Yay welcome Kenneth!

Thanks for the suggestion on paying for the course up front.

One thing I like about email is a lot of people reply to the questions at the end of each of the lessons and it sparks great connections and conversations, which I'd miss out on if I sold it e.g. as a PDF.

It's a totally fair point though, it's also something @AndrewKamphey recommended when I posted in one of his threads about newsletter monetization ideas. Looks like he was right!

🥳

hey steven! i don't promote the individual issues, there is no public archive available.

i do sometimes convert newsletters that get a lot of replies into articles, or post standalone article i send to the subscribers.

best channel has been twitter, long-term, followed in volume by a product hunt launch :)

more than channels though, i think the reason it's grown quickly is because it offers an email course when you sign up that's pretty outcome-oriented. so people "get" why they'd want to subscribe right away.

Thanks Yanis! I'm glad you enjoyed it, it took a lot of self-motivating to write it hahaha.

Hi Andre!

Sure thing, happy to share my experience so far. I only have 100 beta members and am a total n00b at this, so that's my disclaimer :D

• Percent of subscribers: I have no idea and I haven't tried estimating! So far, I've been hand-picking the most engaged subscribers and proactively inviting them until I reached my personal "free limit" of 100. I wanted to "prove" the community to myself before inviting people.
• No, I don't think there's an issue getting people to the community on my domain. Circle's weekly email certainly helps with re-engagement, and I do a monthly community summary newsletter.

Ultimately I'm very happy to have chosen my own domain, because I'm extending the experience with custom tools and content and it would be super un-integrated if I had two websites. Now people have a single account and can use that to comment on the blog, access learning material, discuss in the forum, and I plan to further "productize" the website so it becomes even more useful.

I'd be more than happy to share the figures of the launch with you if you'd like in terms of the email / visits / conversion rate! I guess I'll end up posting something on IH regardless.

Re: Your tweet, one thing is that my members are all developers, and many developers hate facebook. So I felt like FB would really be the wrong place for a community of developers (so many people subscribe to my newsletter with ProtonMail accounts lol). I do run a community for my SaaS subscribers on FB and there it's a great fit because those people are already in tons of groups.

Hope this long-winded rambling is somehow useful? :D

Hey Tim! Thanks for joining up ^_^

I definitely don't see Blogging for Devs as a potential customer segment for Affilimate. There is some crossover but it's very, very small. The path of education would also be too long and slow, as Affilimate is really best suited for people who are already making money and have a fair amount of traffic, but want to get more strategic about it.

However, I do want to try whether a strategy like the one that worked for BFD would work for Affilimate (e.g. attracting people with an email course, or something like a webinar, educational material, etc).

My initial strategy was just to test interest and get exposure as someone who's "building stuff", so that's worked so far and led to some great connections which are relevant for Affilimate, too. There are some common elements like blogging and SEO, so they're not totally disparate.

Honestly there isn't a huge grand plan :D Just testing stuff, seeing what works, and trying to learn.

Just applied to your community as well!

Thank you Kirsten! ^_^

Thanks!

I'm thrilled to hear that, thanks for letting me know :))

Thanks Gabriel :)

I think three things:

a) the topic just really resonates with people: almost every developer has an abandoned tech blog they know they should work on to improve their career capital.

b) people sign up via an email course. it's not just a newsletter. so the focus is really on actionable education and is outcome-oriented.

c) i have a decent following on twitter, and got retweeted by people who helped me get in front of a really large, relevant audience.

yeah. totally! interestingly though, i still got more subscribers from the Twitter launch back in May. just goes to show how powerful a platform twitter can be.