Michael Brooks Developments
Creating tutorials and courses on JAMStack and Laravel.
Last month I created a blog post on zero downtime deployments with Laravel Deployer and GitHub actions. I managed to get a handful of readers by posting it to Hacker News, but it was still rather quiet.
I decided to try and post it onto Laravel News which is a huge community for the Laravel framework. It got approved at the beginning of this month and has been posted to their website, email blast and social media channels.
Overall, they've sent me almost 1,000 new readers and I've had 2 new email subscribers (I'm still learning how to capture more emails). Hopefully, in the future, I can convert them to paid members once I've started creating premium Laravel content.
In the process of getting these new readers, I've tried finding ways to get readers to signup to my blog, and I've also added comments on my posts using Telegram's commenting platform. Hopefully these new features will grab more reader's attention and get me up in the searches for more potential readers.
CodeFund is an ethical advertising platform which doesn't track users and doesn't use cookies. They target programmers and developers so all ads are very well suited for my website and content.
The ads are on my blog page and the posts and they ask that they're placed above the fold since they pay based on impressions and they wouldn't want to waste advertiser's money.
It seems like a fantastic platform and Dustin seems like a great guy. I hope to support him more in the future and if you guys are interested in learning more, you can click through this link.
The University of Exeter has seen been so impressed with my work, they decided to extend my contract for another month to work on bits and bobs. When the month ends, they will look into putting me onto another project and begin another cycle of contracting for 3 - 6 months.
Creating a VuePress Blog is the first blog post to my free course which walks you through creating your own blog using VuePress and NetlifyCMS.
We go through setting it up with VuePress, then pushing to GitHub and finally hosting it with Netlify and hooking into NetlifyCMS. It's a great little series and I would love for you to read it and give feedback.
Creating a VuePress Blog is the first blog post to my free course which walks you through creating your own blog using VuePress and NetlifyCMS.
We go through setting it up with VuePress, then pushing to GitHub and finally hosting it with Netlify and hooking into NetlifyCMS. It's a great little series and I would love for you to read it and give feedback.
I created the blog for Michael Brooks Developments LTD and will be using it as a platform for share development tutorials and content in the hopes to help more people.
The blog is created with Ghost and is hosted on their "Pro" hosting solution. I chose Ghost because it seemed like a better blogging platform then WordPress and focuses on just blogging. I could have also used Medium, but I think they're a losing company.
Ghost is fast, simple and flexible. It's the perfect blogging solution for anyone.
I used My Company Warehouse to officially register as a Limited Company.
It all started when I got made redundant from my previous employment and I wanted to move into the contracting world. You see, this was the third time I had been made redundant and I've always wanted to move into the freelance/contracting world, but have always been too scared to make the jump.
It finally happened and my first contracting client was the University of Exeter, a big uni in Devon, UK and if I could show them how hard I worked, it would mean more potential work from them and it would also impress future clients.
4 Comments
As a rule of thumb when you're just starting I'd say when you have a conversion of 1% you're on the right track (but not yet there). I think a lot of people scroll through the article but because it's quite long, a lot of them don't reach the end. So what you could do is also make a subscribe form halfway your post or even earlier if it's a really long post.
Thanks for your reply and that conversion rate makes sense. You're right, my posts can be very long and at first, I had a little outro which said "If you enjoy this post, please click here to sign up". The text would have a link to my signup page where they could then submit their email.
I figured this added an extra step that isn't needed, so added a form at the bottom which replaced the link. After some feedback from some other devs, they said it's not prominent enough which is when I added a second form closer to the top of the page.
I think doing this has helped me get the extra subscribers and I've thought about adding a third form at the middle, but I think this might be a little too much so I'll stick with having two forms on each post.
Oh I didn't see the first sign up form at first! I think that was because I scrolled to the first header (Setting up Github Actions) because my brain told me everything above this header wasn't imported.
What you could do to highlight it more but not be too intrusive, give the form a different background which has a width of 100% of the screen. Also, I'm a fan of using the primary, secondary, tertiary principles for CTA's so that a page has one obvious CTA which is the most important. Especially at the end of the page the 'Subscribe', 'Continue' and 'Login in to comment' have the same colour while there is probably an action you'd like to trigger more than others.
Interesting, thank you so much for that feedback. I'll definitely roll out some changes and see if things improve.