I just hit my first significant milestone by getting 1000 followers on dev.to and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Now, I want to share my experience starting from the day I’ve created an account. I’m absolutely positive that you can achieve the same result (or way better) if you follow the plan.
First steps
I’ve created an account at DEV a little over 6 months back. I was (and still am) building a Full-Stack JavaScript course, and I wanted to get feedback from the developer community.
I’ve been coding for quite a few years, but I was completely new to writing a blog or promoting my product. I wasn’t aware of any coding communities apart from Stack Overflow. And writing a personal blog on a separate domain isn’t much fun when there’s no one to read it.
Brief googling uncovered 2 options:
- Hashnode
- DEV
I created accounts on both platforms but then decided to stick to DEV as the community seemed a lot more active here. It was Nov 27, 2020.
Posting into the void
As my primary goal was to get the attention of the beginner devs that want to learn Full-Stack JS, I started posting some things that I thought would be interesting for beginners.
It was quite lonely as my posts didn’t attract any readers.
Current numbers look fine, but they don’t tell the full story. Most of the reads came in the recent weeks, and you see that there still is one article with <25 views. Probably it just sucks.
I felt hopeless and was ready to declare growing my DEV following as (yet another) failed experiment, but then I got another idea.
Changing the strategy
As the approach of “posting random things” and hoping for the better didn’t quite work, I decided to change the strategy. What if I just stopped looking at the numbers and posted a new article every day?
In February 2021 I decided to go for it. One day — one article.
To make things easier, I only published the posts that I already wrote. This way I didn’t have to spend too much time coming up with new ideas every day.
Here’s what I wrote in my first article about Type Conversion in JavaScript:
A couple of months back, I’ve started posting colorful JavaScript code snippets that you can use to check your JS skills on my blog. Every problem has the correct answer and explanation. But I strongly suggest you first try to solve it yourself. Every day in February I’m going to post a new JS test here on DEV. Follow, like, comment if it’s something you’re interested in.
And the results immediately improved. After about a week of daily posting, I noticed that I get about 10 new followers each day.
These aren’t your regular coding tutorials or articles. Each of the posts I’ve published was about 200 words and consisted of 4 things:
- a JavaScript code snippet
- a question that an interviewer might ask
- an explanation of what’s going on
- the correct answer
And, last (but not least), I’ve already had the stock of those posts published at learn.coderslang.com, so all I had to do was import them to DEV and log in once a day to hit “publish” and answer the comments.
Keeping it up
My February experiment was very successful. The main takeaway was that consistency and persistence are key. Show up every day, and the results will follow.
The problem was the lack of new articles, so I couldn’t keep up the pace and continue posting daily.
I wrote a couple of longer-from articles (still under 10 minutes of reading time) and got featured in DEV Twitter with 230k followers! Here’s the post about JavaScript Promises that got a ton of views and likes from Twitter.
Getting better
The truth is, I’m not the best writer. And I’m not the best developer in the world either. And I’d be lying if I told you that it wouldn’t matter. It definitely would.
But I’m not here to compare myself with the celebrities with millions of followers. Nor am I here to brag about how great I am and how my success was inevitable.
And have I told you that English is not my first language?
Summary
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Got 1000 followers on DEV in 6 months 🥳
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Very little views/reactions in the first 3 months 🤷
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Consistent daily growth after I started posting a new article each day 💪
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Published 87 posts (average reading time - 2 minutes) ⚡️
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You can do the same 🚀
Now I have only one thing left to say.
THANK YOU!
And remember that if you want to get something or want to learn something new, don’t let anyone stop you. Show up and get things done. The results will follow.