The findings show that 96% of the 70 companies analyzed were functionally invisible in early-stage AI-driven discovery, with just 4.3% maintaining a consistent presence when buyers raised category-level questions to AI systems.

These companies were already investing heavily in marketing. They failed at a structurally different problem – one that their budgets were never designed to solve. Their marketing infrastructure was built for a buyer who types a query, clicks a link, and reads a page.

AI agents, which now handle early-stage vendor research for a growing share of enterprise buyers, parse structured data, query APIs, and return synthesized recommendations to the human who deployed them.

The standard go-to-market playbook, from inbound content to paid campaigns to sales outreach sequences, produces a specific failure mode: it generates signals that only humans can read. A brand story, a nurture email sequence, a gated whitepaper: none of these carry a structured representation that an agent evaluation pipeline can query and surface as output.

A company that has invested three years building brand recognition through those channels has, from the agent's perspective, built nothing at all. The cost isn't future risk. It's current revenue.

This article explains how vendor evaluation changes when the buyer is an AI agent: why agents bypass standard marketing channels during discovery, why products accessible only through a UI are excluded from agent-driven procurement, and why brand equity has no equivalent in AI evaluation. It then examines what the 4.3% of B2B companies currently on those shortlists have built to stay visible to agents and AI discovery tools.

Table of Contents:

• The Shortlisting Stage Your Marketing Can't Reach

• When Product Value is Locked Behind a UI, Agents Can't Buy it

• Brand Equity Has No API

• What the Visible 4.3% Built Differently

Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, surveying 3,235 business and IT leaders across 24 countries, found that nearly three-quarters of companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years. Those agents will evaluate vendors, execute purchases, and initiate contracts on behalf of their human principals.

What makes that timeline uncomfortable for most commercial leaders is its irreversibility: the shortlisting happens before a human ever enters the conversation, which means no relationship, no pitch, and no demo can recover a vendor that was not on the list.

Figure 1: An AI agent skips brand, relationships, and demos entirely. It goes from buyer's brief to ranked shortlist in seconds.

The Shortlisting Stage Your Marketing Can't Reach

Search engine optimization was built on a premise that held for three decades: humans search, algorithms surface results, and humans choose. The entire discipline, from keyword strategy to content marketing to meta descriptions, assumes a human reader who recognizes a brand name and decides to click.

AI agents query structured capability data and return a shortlist to the executive who sent the request.

One thing separates vendors on that shortlist from vendors who never appear: structured, machine-readable documentation that agent evaluation pipelines can parse. The two systems operate through categorically different mechanisms and require entirely separate infrastructure.

The 2X Visibility Index makes the gap concrete. Out of 70 B2B companies analyzed, 95.7% appeared in AI discovery only when buyers already knew the company name and asked about it directly. Being found by a system that already knows a company's name is confirmation, not discovery.

The competitive moment is the stage before that: when an agent assembles a shortlist from structured, machine-readable sources, and vendors without those sources are excluded before any human reviews the output. The data is clear on which companies get skipped. How many CMOs have adjusted next year's budget in response is far less visible.

Figure 2: The discovery gap: 96% of B2B companies are invisible in agent-driven shortlisting despite heavy SEO and brand investment.

BCG's 2026 AI investment survey found that 90% of CEOs believe AI agents will deliver measurable return on investment this year, and 72% have made AI the primary item on their strategic agendas. Those CEOs are deploying agents to source vendors, evaluate software, and procure services on their organization's behalf.

Enterprise buyers and their deployed agents have specific parameters, pricing limits, and capability requirements structured in formats that software can query. The vendors that agents pass over have websites. What makes this structurally uncomfortable is the investment timeline: the brand spend has already happened, and it won't retroactively become machine-readable.

OpenAI's State of Enterprise AI report, published in late 2025, found that the use of structured agent workflows within enterprise organizations grew 19 times over the prior year, with roughly 20% of all enterprise interactions now flowing through tailored, repeatable agent processes. Each of those processes is a potential vendor evaluation engine.

Because agent evaluation criteria are derived from the principal's parameters and applied at query time, no amount of brand familiarity can compensate for the absence of structured data. For commercial leaders, the practical consequence is simple: the pipeline stage that used to belong to awareness now belongs to data architecture.

Figure 3: The GTM stack mismatch: traditional marketing spend buys attention that agents ignore.

When Product Value is Locked Behind a UI, Agents Can't Buy it

Human-centered design assumes a user who reads, scrolls, responds to friction, and asks for help when stuck. Every principle in the UX canon, from onboarding checklists to tooltips to progressive disclosure, addresses that user.

An AI agent calling a vendor's platform doesn't read onboarding checklists. It calls an API, parses the response, and moves on.

The uncomfortable implication: a product whose core value exists only behind a visual interface has nothing to offer an agent-driven buyer, and no path to that buyer's shortlist. For a CPO, that exclusion isn't a future risk. It's the default outcome for any product that hasn't been deliberately instrumented for non-human access.

Salesforce's Agentforce platform closed more than 29,000 enterprise deals in fiscal 2026, delivering 2.4 billion agentic work units and reaching $800 million in annual recurring revenue, up 169% year over year (TechHQ). Those agentic workflows don't navigate the Salesforce UI. They execute through APIs, at a volume no human interface could sustain.

Organizations at that scale have instrumented their product for agent access because the workload agents generate has no human-interface equivalent. Product leaders at competing vendors face a concrete choice: instrument the product for non-human callers now, or cede that workload to vendors that already have.

ServiceNow launched its Autonomous Workforce in May 2026, beginning with a Level 1 Service Desk AI Specialist that resolves common IT support requests without human involvement. ServiceNow's enterprise customers, deploying those agents to manage their own IT operations, send agentic software to interact with every other vendor platform in their stack.

Every vendor in that stack faces the same question: Is the value accessible to a non-human caller, or only to a human who knows where to click? Whether the value is accessible to a non-human caller determines whether that vendor appears in the next procurement cycle.

Deloitte's 2026 survey found that 85% of companies expect to customize agents to fit their specific business needs before deployment. Customized agents evaluate vendors on the specific criteria their principals set: cost per outcome, API reliability, structured reporting, and contract compliance data. Products that can't surface those metrics programmatically are effectively absent from that evaluation.

For a CPO, the consequence of the roadmap is direct: API documentation and programmatic discoverability are treated as infrastructure afterthoughts in most product roadmaps, not core feature-tier priorities, and agent-driven procurement exposes that gap.

Brand Equity Has No API

Brand equity converts repeated exposure into purchase preference through accumulated trust, and that mechanism requires human cognition at every stage. It has no direct equivalent in software.

One partial exception: AI agents built on large language models carry implicit signals from high-authority indexed sources, so companies that dominate analyst reports and peer-review platforms do reach agent-retrievable knowledge indirectly.

That indirect channel operates through structured, indexed coverage: analyst citations and peer-review records. Conference presence and accumulated brand impressions carry no weight there. Brand teams that spent years building analyst relationships and conference presence are discovering that those relationships have no API.

The uncomfortable arithmetic: a brand built over a decade produces no output that an agent procurement pipeline can read at query time.

Figure 4: Brand equity requires human cognition at every stage. Agents bypass the entire chain and query structured data directly.

An AI agent evaluating vendors on behalf of an executive doesn't carry brand familiarity accumulated from years of conference presence, analyst quadrant placement, or thought leadership content. It queries structured data and returns the vendor whose documented specifications match the criteria provided.

BCG found that trailblazing CEOs now allocate 60% of their AI budgets to agentic deployments, with more than 30% actively building agents to work inside their procurement and vendor management functions. The agents that CEOs deploy won't respond to the brand their teams spent years building. They respond to the vendor's data schema. Brand equity doesn't evaporate. It simply becomes inaccessible at the precise moment it would have mattered.

Because agents are scored on cost thresholds, compliance certifications, API response times, and integration compatibility, evaluation pipelines query, score, and act directly on structured API data and schema-documented capabilities. Analyst quadrant placements, Net Promoter Scores, and executive speaking slots carry no equivalent weight in that channel.

Budget allocated to brand campaigns that produce only human-readable output now has a measurable displacement cost: it buys reach in a channel that an expanding share of procurement decisions will never enter. For a CMO, that displacement cost isn't theoretical. It shows up in pipeline coverage as agent-driven accounts route to competitors with queryable proof points.

Closing that gap is an infrastructure problem. The companies currently visible to agent-driven buyers built infrastructure, not campaigns.

What the Visible 4.3% Built Differently

Three infrastructure decisions explain the difference between the 4.3% of B2B companies visible in AI-driven discovery and the 95.7% that are bypassed.

Figure 5: The three things that separate the 4.3% of brands that agents can find and evaluate from the 95.7% that get bypassed.

The first is machine-readable market presence. Structured capability data, published as OpenAPI specifications, schema.org product markup, or queryable JSON-LD metadata, is what agent-driven procurement reads when assembling a shortlist.

For product managers, that reorientation means shifting roadmap priority from interface design toward API documentation and programmatic discoverability. These investments rarely appear in quarterly OKRs. They directly determine whether agent-driven buyers can find and evaluate the product at all.

The second is product instrumentation for non-human callers. Salesforce's 29,000+ Agentforce deals, delivering 2.4 billion agentic work units in fiscal 2026, show the scale at which agent-to-product interactions now operate. Products that serve those interactions through APIs and structured output grow agent-driven usage with every workflow deployed.

Routing the same interactions through a human interface stalls them, and stalled agent workflows rarely retry. One question determines which vendors can capture that scale: Does the product have an endpoint that a non-human caller can use to complete a transaction?

The third is converting brand proof into structured data. Case studies, ROI benchmarks, compliance certifications, and performance guarantees currently live in PDFs, slide decks, and sales collateral written for human persuasion.

Agents retrieving vendor data at query time can't reliably locate, parse, and act on PDF-stored proof at the speed and consistency of structured, queryable records. The proof exists – it's simply stored in a form that excludes the buyer.

For a CRO, the consequence is direct: every unstructured proof point is a qualification the agent-driven account never receives.

BCG estimates a $200 billion opportunity in agentic AI for enterprise service providers. The vendors capturing that opportunity are the ones converting their proof points, specifically the same data that used to go into a QBR deck and went unread between quarters, into structured, queryable records that an agent can access, weigh, and act on before any human meeting is scheduled.

One question determines which vendors enter that market: can the organization make its evidence legible to a non-human evaluator? 96% of B2B companies that were invisible in early-stage AI discovery did not arrive there by deliberate choice.

They arrived through inertia: the same marketing, product, and brand investment motions that worked when every buyer was human still feel like they should work now. Companies that move before this transition reaches mainstream procurement will secure more than improved win rates – they'll capture an entirely new class of buyer, leaving competitors stranded in a human-only marketplace.

Conclusion

The companies that make it onto agent shortlists won't get there through better messaging or a stronger brand narrative. They'll get there because they built what the AI agents can read: queryable product data, API-accessible capabilities, and structured proof points.

The marketing investment that works on human buyers still reaches human buyers. But it doesn't reach the buyer running the procurement workflow right now. That gap exists, and closing it will require an engineering solution.

In this interview with Haider Malik, Simon breaks down how he uses artificial intelligence to practically automate his entire sales process, turning what used to be eight hours of work into just 10 minutes.

Simon explains how he uses AI to power 45 virtual collaborators that handle everything from lead generation to tedious administrative tasks. By connecting Claude (via terminal) to tools like Obsidian, Notion, Granola, and Hunter, he has created a system that manages:

• Lead Generation: Defining your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and finding targeted prospects.

• Automated Outreach: Crafting and AB testing cold emails that sound human and convert.

• Daily Briefings: Using a /today command to gather info from Slack, Gmail, and Calendars to prioritize the day’s high-leverage tasks.

• Knowledge Management: Storing "tacit knowledge" from meetings as structured markdown files in Obsidian for the AI to reference.

The goal of this system is to reduce "cognitive load." By delegating admin tasks to AI "robots," you can spend your time on strategy.

Watch the video on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel ( > 1-hour watch).

Before this move, we've had several product releases, and one requirement stayed constant across all of them: the documentation had to be ready at the time of release. This wasn’t because the product was unintuitive or unusable without docs. It was because the documentation was an integral part of the product experience. A release simply wasn’t considered complete without it.

At a glance, this pattern can be dismissed as operational hygiene. After all, good teams ship docs alongside code. But when you look closer, it points to something more fundamental about how users actually experience products today.

For many products, especially developer-facing ones, documentation is often the first real interaction users have with the product. Before they sign up, before they deploy anything, and sometimes even before they talk to sales, they read the docs. This is where they assess whether the product does what it claims, whether it fits their use case, and whether it is worth investing time and effort into.

In practice, documentation often carries more weight than landing pages or launch blogs. Marketing content may introduce the promise of the product, but documentation is where that promise is tested. It turns positioning into reality by showing how things actually work, what trade-offs exist, and how quickly a user can succeed.

Seen through this lens, documentation is not just a supporting artifact but a marketing tool in its own right. It communicates product value, builds trust at the moment of highest intent, and plays a direct role in adoption.

In this article, I want to unpack why documentation functions this way, and why teams should start treating it as a first-class part of their go-to-market strategy rather than an afterthought.

Table of Contents

• The Role of Documentation in a User's Journey

• How to Build Trust at the Moment of Highest Intent

• So, What Actually Builds Trust in Documentation?

• Documentation and Marketing: A Partnership

• Practical Implications: Treating Docs as Marketing

• Conclusion

The Role of Documentation in a User's Journey

The customer journey does not begin when someone clicks “Buy now” or "Start free trial."

Long before that moment, users are already forming opinions about whether a product is credible, usable, and worth their time. In traditional marketing models, this early phase is described as awareness and evaluation. But for technical products, that evaluation phase looks very different from what classic marketing funnels suggest.

Instead of relying primarily on demos, sales conversations, or brand messaging, technical buyers tend to self-educate. Research from Gartner shows that modern B2B buyers spend a majority of their decision-making process researching independently before ever speaking to sales, and this behavior is even more pronounced among technical audiences who prefer primary sources over promotional material.

For developer tools, APIs, and infrastructure products, documentation becomes one of those primary sources. Users move from high-level marketing pages into documentation to answer concrete questions such as how the product works, what it integrates with, what assumptions it makes, and what it will realistically take to adopt. This transition from marketing to documentation is a natural progression in the evaluation process.

In the book The Product Is Docs, the Splunk documentation team describes this transition as needing to be “seamless, cohesive, and logical.” Their point, much more than consistency in tone or branding, is about continuity of understanding.

When users move from marketing content into documentation, they are testing whether the product narrative holds up under scrutiny. If the documentation is incomplete, confusing, or disconnected from what marketing promised, confidence drops quickly, not only in the docs, but in the product itself.

This idea aligns closely with broader research on content-driven buying behavior. Studies on developer experience consistently show that documentation quality is a key factor in product evaluation and adoption. A report by SlashData found that poor or unclear documentation is one of the top reasons developers abandon tools during evaluation, even when the underlying technology is sound.

What this highlights is that documentation does not sit at the end of the user journey, after a purchase has been made. It sits directly in the middle of the decision-making process. It acts as the bridge between curiosity and commitment. Marketing may introduce the problem space and position the solution, but documentation is where users validate whether the solution is real, usable, and aligned with their needs.

The Splunk team refers to this as creating an “integrated content experience,” where marketing and documentation work together to guide users from initial awareness through evaluation, purchase, and successful implementation.

How to Build Trust at the Moment of Highest Intent

When users arrive at your documentation, they’re no longer casually exploring. They’re actively evaluating whether your product fits their needs and whether it’s worth committing time, effort, or money to. This is what makes documentation a uniquely high-intent touchpoint in the user journey.

In marketing terms, high-intent moments are rare and valuable. They occur when users are close to making a decision and are seeking confirmation.

For technical products, documentation is often the primary surface where this confirmation happens. Research from Google on decision-making behavior shows that users rely heavily on “trust signals” at moments of intent, and for technical buyers, accuracy and depth of information matter more than persuasive language.

This is why documentation quality has an outsized impact on outcomes. When users encounter clear and practical documentation during evaluation, confidence increases. When they encounter gaps, inconsistencies, or ambiguity, doubt sets in immediately. Unlike marketing content, documentation doesn’t get the benefit of abstraction. It’s expected to be precise and complete.

Documentation is part of a continuous guide that “holds a customer’s hand” from evaluation through purchase and into successful usage. This framing is important because it highlights that trust isn’t built once and forgotten. It’s maintained across stages. Documentation inherits the trust marketing creates, but it must earn its own by demonstrating technical credibility and practical value.

This is the point where many products fail because marketing successfully drives interest, but documentation breaks the trust loop by failing to support the claims made earlier. When that happens, users don’t just lose confidence in the docs but also in the product and, by extension, the company behind it.

So, What Actually Builds Trust in Documentation?

Trust in documentation isn’t subjective. It’s shaped by specific, observable qualities that users quickly pick up on during evaluation.

Accuracy is the foundation. When examples work as described, and behavior matches documentation, users feel safe moving forward. When it doesn’t, you have a problem. Studies on developer experience consistently rank inaccurate documentation as one of the fastest ways to lose adoption, even when the underlying product is powerful.

Completeness is a signal of maturity. Documentation that covers core workflows, edge cases, and limitations tells users that the product has been thought through. Gaps, missing sections, or “coming soon” pages suggest instability or unfinished work. For evaluators, this raises red flags about long-term viability.

Another point is honesty, which plays an equally important role. Strong documentation doesn’t hide constraints or trade-offs. Instead, it acknowledges them clearly. Research in trust psychology shows that transparency, even about limitations, increases perceived credibility because it reduces uncertainty and surprises later.

Also, more recently updated docs reflect better on team health. Updated documentation signals active maintenance and ongoing investment. On the other hand, outdated docs suggest abandonment or stagnation. For technical buyers, this is often interpreted as a warning sign about support and future development.

Finally, usability determines whether trust can even form. Documentation that is difficult to navigate, poorly structured, or even hard to search fails before its content is evaluated. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on information-seeking behavior shows that users abandon content quickly when they cannot find answers with minimal effort, regardless of quality.

Together, these factors shape how users perceive not just the documentation, but the product and organization behind it.

Documentation and Marketing: A Partnership

In the book The Product is Docs, the authors observe that documentation teams and marketing teams "have more in common than you might think." Both are responsible for communicating product value to audiences, both create content that influences buying decisions, and both play crucial roles in the customer journey.

Yet these teams often operate separately, thereby creating disconnected experiences for users.

Marketing promises capabilities without understanding technical constraints, while documentation focuses on implementation details without connecting to broader use cases or business value.

The result of this is a jarring transition from marketing to product that undermines both efforts.

So, how can marketing help documentation?

Marketing teams bring a valuable perspective to documentation:

• Customer insights: Marketing interacts directly with prospects and customers through demos, events, and demand generation. These interactions surface real questions and pain points that documentation should address.

• Competitive intelligence: Understanding how competitors document their products can reveal opportunities for differentiation or improvement.

• Strategic priorities: Knowing which features marketing will emphasize helps documentation teams focus their effort where it will have the most impact.

• Target audience definition: Marketing's customer research and personas can inform documentation structure and examples.

And...how can good documentation help marketing?

Documentation teams bring equally valuable assets to the partnership:

• Technical accuracy: Documentation teams can review marketing materials for technical correctness and help refine messaging to be both compelling and accurate.

• Content leverage: Well-written documentation can be adapted into blog posts, white papers, and other marketing content.

• User feedback: Documentation teams often receive direct feedback from users about what's confusing or what features resonate most.

• Writing expertise: Technical writers can help develop clearer, more effective marketing content.

The Splunk team emphasizes that this collaboration should span the entire release cycle: "Before you write" (to align on priorities and naming), "As you write" (to validate approaches), and "After you write" (to ensure consistency and quality).

Figure 1: Embedding docs in the release cycle

Practical Implications: Treating Docs as Marketing

If documentation is indeed a marketing tool, what changes in how we approach it?

1. Documentation should ship with product launches

This is where my own experience began. Documentation can't be an afterthought that ships weeks after launch. If docs are part of how users evaluate and adopt the product, they need to be ready when the product is. This means involving documentation teams early in the development process, not at the end.

As the Splunk team notes in their discussion of Agile development: "There is no definition of ‘done’ without docs. Customer documentation is part of the working software." This principle should extend to marketing launches as well.

2. Invest in documentation quality and discoverability

If documentation influences buying decisions, it deserves the same attention to quality and user experience as marketing websites. This means:

• Professional design and navigation

• Fast search functionality

• Clear information architecture

• Mobile-friendly formatting

• SEO optimization for relevant queries

Too often, documentation sites are neglected from a UX perspective while marketing pages receive constant refinement. This sends a message about priorities that users notice.

3. Create an integrated content experience

The transition from marketing to documentation should feel natural. This requires:

• Consistent terminology: Features should be named the same way in marketing materials and documentation.

• Aligned narratives: The use cases highlighted in marketing should have detailed implementation guides in the documentation.

• Cross-linking: Marketing pages should link directly to relevant documentation sections, and vice versa.

• Shared success metrics: Both teams should care about the same outcomes – not just awareness or signups, but successful implementation and adoption.

The Splunk team describes this as helping customers avoid feeling "disoriented or, worse, feel misled." Good documentation delivers on marketing's promises with specifics on how to achieve the outcomes that were advertised.

4. Measure documentation impact on conversion

If documentation is part of the marketing funnel, it should be measured as such. As a documentation team, you should track metrics like:

• Documentation page views from prospective customers

• Time spent in docs before conversion

• Most-viewed pages during evaluation periods

• Correlation between documentation engagement and trial-to-paid conversion

• Customer feedback on documentation quality during the buying process

These metrics help demonstrate documentation's business impact and justify investment in quality improvements.

If you're curious about examples of docs that embody these strategies, then you might want to check out Twilio, Stripe, or, as mentioned earlier, the Splunk docs.

Why does all this matter now?

The role of documentation in driving adoption has always been important, but several trends are making it more critical:

First, as more companies adopt PLG strategies, the product experience, including documentation, becomes the primary sales vehicle. There's no sales team to answer questions or guide implementation. The docs must do that work.

Second, technical buyers increasingly want to evaluate products independently before engaging with sales. Documentation is often their primary evaluation tool.

We’re also seeing shorter sales cycles. When buying cycles compress, there's less time for demos and sales engineering. Documentation needs to answer questions immediately.

And finally, for developer tools and infrastructure products, individual contributors often drive adoption from the bottom up. These users rely heavily on documentation for their evaluation process.

In this environment, treating documentation as an operational necessity rather than a strategic asset is a competitive disadvantage. Companies that recognize documentation as a core part of their go-to-market strategy and invest accordingly see better conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.

Conclusion

Documentation is not just a post-purchase support resource. It's an active participant in the customer journey, influencing buying decisions and driving adoption.

For technical products, especially, documentation often carries more weight than traditional marketing materials.

This doesn't mean documentation should become marketing copy. It means recognizing that documentation performs a marketing function such as communicating value and building credibility, even while maintaining its technical accuracy and practical focus.

As the Splunk documentation team wisely notes, the goal is to create an integrated content experience where marketing and documentation work together to guide users from initial interest through successful implementation.

So, the requirement that documentation be ready at release time wasn't just operational hygiene. It was recognition that our product wasn't truly ready for market until users could both evaluate it and successfully use it. That's what makes documentation a marketing tool, not because it makes exaggerated claims, but because it delivers on the promise that marketing makes.

Getting those first few users can feel like climbing a mountain. It’s the hardest part, but also the most important. Without customers, your SaaS doesn’t grow.

Without feedback from real users, you can’t improve. And let’s be honest – seeing people pay for your product is a huge motivation boost.

I’ve seen this challenge many times, and I know the pressure is real. That’s why I’m breaking it all down in the simplest way possible. No confusing words, no vague advice – just a clear plan you can use.

Let’s jump right in.

Why Getting Your First SaaS Customers Matters So Much

Before we talk strategy, let’s be super clear about why the first customers are gold:

• They validate your idea. If strangers are willing to pay, you’re onto something real.

• They help you shape the product. Early users are honest about what works and what’s broken.

• They fuel your momentum. A few early wins can give you the confidence to keep pushing forward.

• They help you spread the word. Happy first customers are often your best marketers.

Your first ten customers matter more than your next hundred. So it’s worth taking the time to get this right.

Real Ways to Get Your First SaaS Customers

1. Start With People You Know

Don’t be shy to reach out to friends, family, former coworkers, and old clients. Tell them about your new SaaS and ask if they know anyone who might need it.

And remember: you’re not begging – you’re offering something valuable.

Pro Tip: Focus on the people they know, not just whether they want to buy themselves.

2. Join Communities Where Your Customers Hang Out

Find Facebook groups, Reddit forums, Slack communities, or LinkedIn groups where your ideal users already spend time.

Be helpful. Answer questions. Join conversations. Build trust. Then, when it’s natural, mention your product.

Real Example: If you built a tool for yoga instructors, find Facebook groups for yoga teachers.

3. Launch on Product Hunt

Product Hunt is full of early adopters looking for new tools.

If you do a good launch (with a nice-looking page, clear description, and a bit of buzz on the side), you could get your first few hundred signups in one day.

Helpful read: How to Launch on Product Hunt Successfully

4. Offer a “Beta” Version

Invite early users to test your software before the official launch.
Make it feel special – they get early access, and their feedback will shape the product.

Bonus Tip: Beta users are often more forgiving about bugs. They expect a few rough edges.

5. Use Cold Outreach (But Do It Right)

Sending emails to strangers sounds scary. But if you write short, respectful, personalized emails, it works.
Focus on how you can solve a real problem they have – not on how great your product is.

Good Cold Email Example:

"Hi [Name],
I noticed you [specific detail]. I built a tool that might save you [X hours / $X per month].
Would you like me to send a quick demo?"

Keep it about them, not you.

6. Get Active on LinkedIn

Post helpful tips, mini case studies, and personal stories. Show people you understand their struggles.
It builds trust. It shows you’re serious. And it keeps you top-of-mind when someone does need your product.

7. Partner With Other Small Businesses

Find companies that serve the same audience but aren’t direct competitors.

Maybe you made a booking app for barbershops. You could partner with a payment processor or marketing agency that also targets barbers.

Offer a referral deal or co-host a webinar together.

8. Content Marketing (Start Small)

You don’t need a full blog with 50 articles right away. Start with 2–3 simple, super-useful blog posts that answer real questions your customers have.

Example:

If you built an invoicing tool, write posts like:

• “How to Send Your First Invoice as a Freelancer”

• “5 Mistakes New Freelancers Make With Payments”

Helpful Link: Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing

9. Run a Tiny Paid Ad Test

A small Facebook or Google ad campaign (even $5–10 a day) can give you quick feedback.

Target very specifically – not just "small business owners," but "independent yoga teachers in New York."

Watch which messages work, which don’t, and adjust fast.

10. Create Simple Case Studies

Even if you only have one early customer, ask them if you can tell their story. How they used your product. What problem it solved. What results they saw.

Nothing builds trust faster than real success stories.

11. Offer a Founder's Deal

Offer lifetime discounts or special plans to your first customers. This rewards them for taking a chance on you early, and it creates urgency (“only 20 spots left!”).

Example: Lifetime access for $99 instead of $20/month.

12. Make It Ridiculously Easy to Share

Add a simple “Share with a friend” button in your app, emails, and thank-you pages. Happy users want to help – just make it easy for them.

FAQs

Should I offer my SaaS for free at first?

I would recommend a free trial instead of free forever. Free users are often less serious. You want customers who see value and are willing to pay for it.

How long does it usually take?

Honestly? It depends. Some people land their first customers in a week. Others need a few months. Stay patient and keep improving both your product and your outreach.

What if no one seems interested?

It happens. If you're hearing crickets, it might be time to talk directly to potential customers, ask more questions, and tweak your offer. Sometimes it’s just a positioning problem.

Final Thoughts

Getting your first SaaS customers isn’t about being perfect. It’s about getting real people to trust you enough to give your product a shot. Start small. Talk to people. Solve real problems.

And keep improving a little every day.

If you need a hand with SaaS marketing or growing your idea, I’m always happy to connect. You can find me on X at x.com/_udemezue, or check out my portfolio: Udemezue.pages.dev.

Further Resources

If you want to dive deeper, check out:

• The Mom Test (book) — How to talk to customers and get honest feedback.

• Indie Hackers — A community where founders share how they got their first users.

• First 1000 Users Guide (from Demand Curve) — Very detailed but still easy to follow.

Well, for years, marketing and user experience (UX) have been treated as separate worlds. Marketing grabs attention and drives sales, while UX makes products easy and enjoyable to use.

It may seem that they speak different languages, but if we dig a little deeper, we may find that they share a common foundation – often telling the same story in different words.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how the classic 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) intersect with UX to reveal how these disciplines can collaborate to create cohesive and effective product experiences.

The Four P’s: Marketing’s Old Recipe for Success

In 1960, marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy introduced what he called the “marketing mix,” famously distilled as the Four P’s of marketing. The four elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion – became the cornerstone of modern marketing strategy.

This simple framework was about orchestrating everything a business offers: making the right product, at the right price, available at the right place, with the right promotion.

For decades, the 4Ps guided how companies aligned their offerings with customer needs and expectations. And even today, the 4Ps remain “a foundational model in marketing,” widely taught and practiced for one reason, which is that it works. Get each “P” right – build a product people want, price it fairly, distribute it conveniently, and communicate its value clearly – and that sets the stage for success.

Marketing hasn’t really changed at its core since McCarthy’s time. Sure, we’ve gone digital and added more Ps (like People, Process, and so on), but the heart of marketing is still understanding customers and delivering value.

What has changed is the context. As the century turned and the internet era took off, consumer behavior shifted dramatically. In this digital transformation, a new discipline rose to prominence alongside marketing: User Experience design, or just UX.

The term “user experience” itself was popularized in the 1990s by cognitive psychologist Don Norman to describe “all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products”.

In essence, UX zooms in on how people feel when using a product or service to achieve their goals. It asks whether the product is usable, useful, and even enjoyable, and whether it meets the user’s needs without hassle.

As Norman and Nielsen famously put it, the first requirement for an exemplary UX is to meet the customer’s exact needs, without fuss or bother. And doing that well is the job of UX designers as much as it is the job of engineers, marketers, graphic designers, and interface designers.

In other words, great UX has always been a team sport, with marketing playing an important position in shaping user expectations.

Fast-forward to today, where marketing and UX are often seen as separate silos – but they’re really two sides of the same coin.

Both exist to create value for people. Both put the user (or customer) at the center of their decisions. Both aim to make a product desirable and worthwhile. The difference is that they just approach it from different directions.

Marketing is about increasing the perceived value of a product through messaging, brand, and offerings, while UX is about decreasing the effort and friction for the user through good design. Put together, those efforts determine whether a product is actually worth it to the people using it.

Two Disciplines, One Goal via Different Paths

If we think of the journey as starting from when a customer first hears about a product to when they become a loyal user, marketing tends to focus on the “before”. Its responsibilities are customer acquisition, attracting the right people, and shaping their expectations.

On the other hand, UX focuses on the “after”. It takes over once the user is in the door, striving for customer satisfaction and retention while ensuring the product delivers on its promise.

• The marketer asks, “How do we get people to notice and try this product?”

• The UX designer asks, “Now that they’re here, how do we make this experience fulfilling so they’ll stay (and come back)?”

These are two halves of a continuous cycle. If marketing sets up a great promise and UX provides a great product experience, you’ve created something powerful: trust and loyalty.

If either side falls short, say, misleading hype from marketing or a clunky product from design, the whole experience breaks down. It’s no surprise, then, that the 4Ps matter just as much to UX as they do to marketing, as the 4Ps define the context in which users experience a product.

Let’s see how each P influences the user experience:

Product: What is being offered?

This is the core of the experience. A product’s features and quality solve a problem for the user (or fail to). In marketing terms, a product is a bundle of benefits and values that fulfill a need. In UX terms, understanding the right product means researching what users truly need and designing the solution around that.

If the product doesn’t fit the user’s needs, no amount of pretty UI or even UX can fix that. McCarthy’s framework itself was about ensuring you have the “right product” to satisfy the target consumer.

Price: How much does it cost, and what is its value?

Price is more than a number on a tag that sets an expectation in the user’s mind for what the product is worth. It also represents what the user is investing (money, but also time and effort). If an app is free but demands tons of personal data or time, that’s a “price” a user pays as well.

UX designers implicitly deal with price when they consider the effort a user must exert. A key principle in UX is minimizing “interaction cost”, which is the mental or physical effort to complete a task. To put it differently, a good UX strives to make the user’s side of the value exchange as smooth and fair as possible. When the price, which could be in dollars or effort, feels too high for the perceived benefit, the experience will suffer.

Place: Where and how does the user access the product?

This is about distribution and context. From a UX perspective, the questions to ask are whether it’s a mobile app used on the go, a website used from a desktop at work, or a physical retail store.

The marketing job is to put the product where its audience can find it. UX’s job is to ensure it works well in that context. A user’s environment (noisy bus vs. quiet office, 5-minute window vs. leisurely hour) can drastically affect their experience.

The best marketing in the world won’t help if the product isn’t available where users need it, and the best-designed interface will frustrate if it doesn’t fit the context of use. “Place” is part of the experience, like a stage on which your UX plays out.

Promotion: What does the user hear about the product, and does the experience live up to that message?

Promotion is how marketing sets expectations through advertising, branding, content, and word-of-mouth. It’s the story of the product. UX, in turn, is about delivering on that story. If the marketing promises one thing and the product delivers another, users feel disappointed or even deceived. Conversely, when promotion and experience align, the product feels trustworthy.

This is the reason why modern UX teams pay attention to onboarding messaging, in-app copy, and other content: they know every touchpoint either reinforces or contradicts what the user has been told. A good promotion can draw a user in, but only a matching UX will keep them in.

As the Nielsen Norman Group notes, both marketing and UX ultimately “aim to make a product or service desirable” by increasing its perceived utility and value. Promotion creates the desire, and UX fulfills it.

Understanding these overlaps helps explain how most UX problems aren’t just UI problems or usability problems. Often, when a product fails for users, the culprit is a disconnect in one of the above areas.

Maybe the product didn’t actually solve the problem the user thought it would, which could be a product/expectation issue. Maybe the user felt the outcome wasn’t worth what they had to put in, which is a Price/value issue, with too much effort for too little reward. Perhaps they never fully understood the product’s value or got lost finding it, which is a Place/distribution issue. Or, they might have felt a little too let down because the hype didn’t match reality, which is a Promotion/trust issue.

Many of these so-called “UX issues” boil down to expectation, value, and trust, the same concerns at the heart of marketing. But these are often completely ignored by UXers because they are deemed “out of scope”. And it is no coincidence that an actual seamless user experience tends to foster brand trust and loyalty.

So, when UX and marketing are in sync, the product feels right to the user on top of it working well. It meets the expectations set, provides real value, and earns the user’s confidence.

Big picture: UX happens within a value exchange between a user and a product, and the 4Ps define many of the terms of that exchange. If a UX designer ignores things like pricing strategy or how the product is marketed, they might be missing half the story of the user’s experience.

A Shared Foundation between UX and the 4Ps and Why It Matters Today

There’s often a quiet tension in organizations between the UX team and the marketing team. Marketers might joke that designers only care about “pretty screens,” and UX designers might grumble that marketers would sell anything with a flashy ad.

But at the end of the day, both teams are trying to solve the same problem. Both try to connect people with a product in a meaningful way, using their own processes and coming at it from different angles.

If users are churning or a product flops, it doesn’t really matter whether we call it a marketing failure or a UX failure – it’s usually a bit of both. This realization is exactly why the common ground between UX and marketing is so important in today’s digital product landscape.

Thinking with a marketing mindset, in fact, can make UX design stronger and more holistic. The classic marketing questions – Who is the customer? What do they need? What will they pay or sacrifice? How do they discover us? – are strategic questions that UX designers should ask as well. They force us to zoom out from the interface and consider the entire user journey.

The 4Ps framework is about interplay, as it is about tactics in isolation to ensure we’re aligning everything from the thing being sold to how people find it, what it costs, and where they get it. It asks whether we are even solving the right problem, in the right way, for the right people. And that should be a UX concern as much as a marketing concern, as that is the central question of making any product successful.

So why does this shared space between these two domains matter so much today? It’s because designing a great product is no longer confined to just the product’s interface or just the advertising around it, but with a cohesive experience from first impression to last use.

The lines between discovery, purchase, use, and re-use have blurred. A user can see an Instagram ad (promotion), click straight into an app store (place), download and try an app (product), and decide within minutes if it’s worth paying for full features (price). If any part of that chain breaks, say the ad misleads, or the app is confusing, or the value for cost isn’t there, the user is gone.

This means that teams need a common lens. The 4Ps offer exactly such a lens, bridging strategy and design. And maybe other marketing frameworks do, too. But the most important thing to remember is that marketing and UX are really playing in the same field of contributing to the total experience a customer has.

How to Mindfully Collaborate Between UX and Marketing Teams

Getting UX and marketing to work together can be messy in practice, as we’re merging different domains – and of course we may not get it right at first. The important thing is to be mindful of potential friction points as well as opportunities for collaboration.

It’s similar to running a new campaign. The first few attempts rarely deliver results, and throwing hands up after initial failures is common, but shortsighted. Teams could instead try openly sharing failures and frustrations, which is a rare thing to do, but that is how we can find things we usually don’t.

We should let marketing look into UX’s messy usability tests, let UX dig through marketing’s failed campaigns, and ask each other simple, tough questions. Questions like, ‘What would marketing do here? How might UX solve this problem?’ It can feel awkward, even frustrating, but doing this can uncover critical insights neither team could find alone.

Realistically, meaningful collaboration won’t happen by itself and thus might mean trying joint workshops once in a while – not every week, maybe just every few months – purely to understand each other's perspective. Marketers could step into the shoes of UX designers, and UX teams could tackle marketing challenges, engaging in a role-swapping session to build empathy.

We have to acknowledge from the get-go that these sessions could get uncomfortable, but that’s exactly the point. Solving big problems means dealing with uncertainty, making mistakes, and iterating patiently until we see what works.

Engaging in activities like working in the same sandbox, swapping insights and failures, role-playing each other’s perspective, asking “each other’s” questions as well as “each other” questions could help embrace frustration.

All in all, it’ll involve leaning into each other’s domains, understanding that persistence through repeated attempts is exactly how UX and marketing teams’ amalgamation might help solve great, challenging problems.

Final Thoughts

UX and marketing have always been two voices telling the same story. But for too long, we’ve drawn an imaginary line between them when in truth, they’re team members on a shared mission.

A UX designer talks about empathy and ease. A marketer talks about value and desire. Different words, but same goal to resonate with a human need.

The classic 4Ps of marketing should be taken as a mirror for UX that reflects a more holistic way to design. This definitely isn’t about doing marketing’s job and vice versa, but rather doing our job with a wider lens and striving to realize that what we thought was “their” language was always part of our own.

Only a few of us come naturally to self-marketing. Most of us prefer making the thing and enjoy showing it off (at least a little!), but hope it’ll be appreciated on its own merits – or that someone else will champion it.

Deliberate marketing and sales makes people uncomfortable, and understandably so, because asking for money is like asking for love.

But if you worked hard on something thoughtful, it deserves to be noticed! And that means you’ll have to market it.

I spent years resisting marketing. Self-promotion is vulgar and sales seemed unseemly. And so I learned the hard way:

1. Your friends and colleagues aren’t a channel (a conduit to the people who want your goods). They might not even have your customers as part of their network or audience. You can ask, but don’t rely on the people you know. Go find the people you want to help!
2. If no one knows about your service or product, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. So start marketing, and if you can’t find sales, it’s still a hobby, but at least you’ll be aware of its potential.
3. The things that annoy you about others, or fear doing yourself, are probably things you should learn how to do. Just do them in a way that wouldn’t annoy you if you were a customer.

I’ve written this to break down what I learned-while-doing about creating a product or service for people. Specifically, it’s about the landing pages and channels you’ll use to promote your product or service, and the basics of having an email list.

Here’s what we'll cover:

1. How to Design to Serve Real People (Not Just Your Creativity)
2. How to Communicate What You’re Offering While You Develop it
3. Why Email Marketing is Necessary
4. How to Integrate a Mailing List with Your Website
5. What Landing Pages Are About
6. Writing, Rewriting, and Sharing Your Content
7. Different Landing Pages and Their Analytics
8. How to Avoid the Free = Ick Factor
9. Multiple Offerings and List Groups
10. Final Advice for Beta Testers, and the Video Intro
11. Conclusion

How to Design to Serve Real People (Not Just Your Creativity)

You are likely working on an idea based on a need you identified and a thing you are able to do. Now you’re trying to make it fit for other people. That’s one way to approach design, and that’s okay. Design is about elegantly fulfilling a need:

1. The customer is experiencing pain in getting from state A to A’ or B : an obstruction or a gap that they are having trouble negotiating.
2. The customer is getting around the obstruction or gap in a habitual or work-around kind of a way, but there’s frustration: inefficiency, extra steps, aesthetics, approvals. (There could be a whole other way of doing things, but they don’t know it yet.) And lastly (or alternatively):
3. The customer is seeking an emotional reward like security, status, identity, love, beauty, harmony, health, self-expression, self-actualization, or the attainment of a dream.

Figure out what you’re trying to respond to with your idea. (If it’s item #3, tread carefully. Purveyors in this category are consumer brands, artists, and charlatans. If this was the category you fell into when being marketed to, you wouldn’t want to be duped!)

Before you do anything else, you have to do the hard part: go out and ask people non-leading questions about the problem. Don’t propose your solution in any way; listen for what they say would be their solution.

If you get out of your own head and listen to what’s in other people’s heads, you’ll come up with some a-ha moments that will help you in two ways:

1. You can design your product or service to better respond to their actual needs, or
2. You can communicate to this exact need and demonstrate how your product will help them.

The research you’re doing for the design and the communication is your value proposition. The features you build will correspond to your value proposition, and it will all evolve accordingly.

How to Communicate What You’re Offering While You Develop It

Too many people wait until a product is well underway before they start talking about it. Why?

There are a lot of reasons, many of which stem from “impression management” that range from seeming boring (your idea is a knock-off) or flaky (it changes all the time), to inducing the kind of envy that courts competition and controversy.

People implicitly know both the need and the catch-22 of building “social proof.” But know this: the world will be utterly indifferent to your ideas until you have an audience!

There are many ways—channels—to reach your customers, and only some of them are online.

As explained in Traction, you need to start developing and communicating with your marketing channels at the same time as you develop the product. You may even need to add or shut down a channel to find and focus on your customers.

If all goes well, by the time your product is ready, your audience will be, too.

So one of the necessary parts of those channels—for almost all of them, and certainly when it comes to a code-based product—are landing pages and the email list.

Why Email Marketing is Necessary

If you already engage with the folks in your topic area on social media, then you’ve got an opportunity to shine. But places you hang out on also have a culture, and through this, you’re at risk of being distracted or seduced and misdirected.

Your attention is precious, and you should use social media only to glean and boost what’s worthy of it. If social media is costing you time, focus, equanimity, or social capital (status is a zero-sum game!), then it’s working against you.

Which brings us down to email. Even with the rise of Slack and Microsoft Teams, email is how we get work done and find out about things in our communities.

In all honesty, the high-frequency repeat demand of email is not enjoyable, and you have to be aggressive with how you keep your Inbox working for you.

Most of us subscribe to too many newsletters, and too many email marketers have been abusive of our attention. The sheer volume buries good email habits, along with what’s actually needed in your inbox, because who can keep up? And then we rely on extensions and AI to substitute for a reasonable attention-load.

Yet despite all that, there are emails that I love getting (though I wish just a little less frequently). When I sit down to read my Inbox or folders, I share the articles I like, regardless of their date.

Email is private communication. Barring any forwards, bcc:, or abuse of privacy (which you shouldn’t expect from recipients of a broadcast list), it’s simply a message from the list owner to you, or you to your list members. Readers can ignore it, engage with it, or simply read and archive it.

Unlike other channels, where you don’t know who’s-seen-what unless they engage with it, you own this connection to your audience. It can’t be reduced or taken away by the social platform; you only lose them if their emails bounce or they unsubscribe.

Email isn’t subject to the algorithms that bump you up or down in visibility and priority, depending on engagement.

It’s also not subject to the dampening influence of observers who pay attention to the online behaviour of their connections. We all want group interactions to go in our favour, so people are careful what bandwagons they join.

Email, being private, doesn’t have these meta-filters, so it’s a way to get to know your customer, while letting them get to know you. How refreshingly old-fashioned and well-behaved!

And the truth remains: if people let into your email box, and you make yourself a good guest, you’re welcome to continue to talk about your mutual interests. Your audience will come to like, respect, share, and buy from you.

So before you start communicating with people on your list, decide how you’re going to make yourself a good guest.

Best practices for an email list

First, email hygiene:

1. Their inbox isn’t free real estate for advertising. Always provide information of value that they don’t have to click for.
2. Their priorities in life aren’t yours. Do not abuse them with frequency or urgency. Set a schedule of quarterly or every six weeks (ideal for charities; startups, too), monthly (professional events and news round-ups), or bi-weekly or weekly (for local events or lots of relevant news). More than once a week? That’s pestering.
3. Tell them when to expect you: either a consistent date (e.g. the 14th; the second Thursday of the month; Wednesday afternoons), or an anticipation of when the next newsletter will be.
4. Do not resend-to-unopened. So what if people aren’t opening your email? It might be because they’re backlogged or doing other things. You resending it (even with a different subject line, such as A/B testing) double-taxes their attention. They don’t need it. Don’t use this self-serving email tool (your provider will suggest you try it!). If it’s really that important, you take the hit and write them a new message.

Next, style and personality (yes, including for projects and brands):

1. Create a simple, consistent, and personalized (to them by name, not “hey, everybody!”) template to make your efforts easier and your message readable.
2. Give readers a reason to open it (a good headline and lede every time!). Write from a point of view. You want them to enjoy your message, or at least understand why it’s pertinent.
3. People respect it when your message is complete and not trying to get something out of them. If you tease them a little—curiosity gets clicks—this is doubly important. Do you need that click (for your advertising model)? Or is it FYI?
4. Is the click where the value lies for them? Then be succinct, but not too brief. Give them more than a headline and an image. Give them enough that will jog their memory after they have clicked through. If it’s that good, they’ll look for it again in their archive.
5. Don’t make an image in an email clickable, unless it’s to zoom the image! Accidental clicks are sneaky and annoying. Make every click obvious and intentional.
6. Even if your company is big, monitor the email address you send from. Let people get in touch with you! When I encounter a “noreply—go to knowledgebase/tech support,” I feel like they don’t have much concern for how their output impacts me or my input impacts them.

How to Integrate the Mailing List with Your Website

How? Easy. Email marketing service providers give you an API key and a plugin for your website. (These aren’t shown on the accompanying video, so I’m bridging this very small gap.)

If you haven’t already, sign up for MailChimp (or ConvertKit, Blackbaud, Ontraport, MadMimi, ConstantContact, AWeber, or others). Then download and install the corresponding plugin, such as this one here (I’m using MailChimp and WordPress). Find your API key, and enter it in the plugin. These are (typically) the only two screens you need.

The Mailchimp plugin to integrate with WordPress and WooCommerce.

• Alternatively, the “Mailchimp for WP” plugin will do the same with your API key, and it helps you make prettier forms for your website. It also lets you update them globally (across all pages) that use its shortcode. I talk about this later, and you‘ll see it in action in the accompanying video.
• Plugins are not only for subscribing! They can also help you get information about what page induced someone to sign up, and sort them into groups. Your email provider will have documentation about that.

This article isn’t going to discuss pop-ups, slide-ins, or lightbox (modal) email opt-ins. The learning curve for implementing them isn’t fast or easy. Swearing will be involved, and possibly some tears. When it’s time for you to make a pop-up, dedicate time and money for learning, creation, and repeated testing.

Once you’ve connected your website to your email service provider, it’s time to build a landing page.

What Landing Pages Are About

A landing page is a webpage that informs the reader of your offering and obliges them to do one thing: download your app, subscribe to your email list, register their interest in your course, event, book, product, or other development.

The landing page is about removing as much friction as possible between the customer and their goal, by your means. It contextualizes their pain, their frustration, or their desire, and how you’re solving it for them.

People’s patience, interest, and attention spans are short. Get out of their way. It’s the “main focus, explain, Call to Action.” Landing pages are going to be very useful to you, because they gauge people’s interest in at least committing the time to know more.

Be clear about your idea, about what you’re doing, its benefits, and what to expect of email from you. Strip out any extraneous stuff—your social links or any other menu navigation. When you give people a path out of the action you want them to take, even “more information,” they take it, and almost never commit (convert).

If they’re determined to know more, they’ll truncate your URL back to your domain and poke around, which is why some marketers buy a unique domain for every product or campaign. With this in mind, I resisted putting any navigation on my WordPress site until I had to have it, and then I put it at the bottom of the page.

So let’s build it:

• Write out your offering—your value proposition—in 250 words or less (see below for writing tips).
• Pull five of those sentences—the most powerful, clear ones that can make a semblance of a complete argument—and use those in your landing page. (You can use more than 5 sentences, just, those are the anchors.)
• Place one call-to-action (CTA)—generally, Sign Up to the email list (“waitlist” until you have something to announce)—within the first screen of the landing page (see “Opt-in form submission how-to,” below).
• Then, use an explainer video, an image, and other persuasive writing such as storytelling and testimonial quotes. These ensure that the reader understands the use case and how it can help them.
• Provide a final CTA with the opt-in form, and make it central, obvious, and compelling. In one talk I attended on this topic, they mentioned having a cartoon or an image of a person looking directly at the CTA, and how well it “converted” people.

Conversion simply means people believe your copy enough to want to provide something of value—that is, their email address—in exchange for learning or obtaining more.

To take advantage of the chance that someone searches for your value proposition, use SEO keywords in the landing page. Use a three-word phrase in the page’s keyword meta data, based on the seeker's likely search term for their need. This is often the most similar idea out there. Use a short URL that matches your headline and a keyword.

Don’t worry about how your page compares to slick landing pages from bigger companies. They can afford an agency or a landing page provider.

Once you’ve learned how to do this the from-scratch way, you’ll better evaluate the many landing page solutions that’ll do the same for you. MailChimp even provides unique campaign landing pages on your account. (This is covered in the accompanying video.)

Writing, Rewriting, and Sharing Your Content

Here are a few tips that will make any writing better:

• Get out of your own way and just dump it. Tell it like you would to someone you know. If you’ve met someone like your ideal customer in real life, write to that person.
• If your project has you and someone else working on it, say we. If it’s just you, say I, unless it’s a statement that empathizes and identifies with the customer’s situation. Honesty disarms and connects.
• Make long sentences short. (Then, decide if you need that sentence after all.)
• Chop long paragraphs into two or three short paragraphs, but do not chop paragraphs into single sentences unless it makes sense in the context of what you're writing.
• Paste it into the Hemingway app and make sure that it’s no higher than Grade 9. Grade 6 is even better.
• Read it aloud. Does it sound like you? How about like talking to your mom? Fix it ‘til it does.
• Make a headline for the landing page—and a matching social media lede, and email subject line—that is clear, curious, and bold. This is super-important. Try to write ten different headlines. Read up on headline writing; it will always inspire you to come up with phrases you’d never think up on your own. If you write a bunch, you’ll find a great one.
• Show your page to someone else.*
• The next day: one final check, and then publish it.

• If you need to edit it again later, that’s to be expected. The days of frozen content are long gone.

• If someone uses the word “confusing” about your writing (usually with a gravity that judges you), don’t take it personally. Ditto for any other critical comment that deflates you when you’re putting a lot of heart and anxiety into it. (You should be writing from the heart, and anxiety, properly understood, keeps you sharp.)

You just need to tighten up your writing and layout. You could also be hearing from someone who isn’t part of your audience, and there are a lot of people who won’t understand what isn’t written exactly for them.

Take the useful feedback and make a change.

Tailor the message for each type of share you do, and be savvy about matching the headline or the lede to the content of the landing page, so that it meets their expectations.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is! And there’s more to it yet, so schedule it and pace yourself.

Different Landing Pages and Their Analytics

From your customer interviews, you should have a decent idea of your “Ideal Customer” (also called a persona). You should also have a good idea where they might be on other channels: where on social media; which other businesses have them on their email lists. You might then want to know how they found you, when they do come.

A multi-channel approach to landing pages

If you know your market well, you will have one primary “Ideal Customer” and up to two secondary. (Know what they have in common, and any powerful difference.) Also know if you have different goals, for example: buy the product, beta-test the app, or hand over their email (also known as lead generation).

The overlap, the difference, and the goals you have for each is the number of landing pages you should have. So if you have two goals for your landing pages, and two segments with an overlap, then you have at least three and up to six landing pages.

But start with the main segment and its goal, which would be lead generation (once you can send them a message, they can choose to download/buy from there).

After that landing page “engine” is working for you, if you want to broaden your reach, you can start creating the secondary landing pages.

There are different ways to get them to click through your landing page:

• Put the link in your personal/business email footer.
• Mention it in a forum or a community Slack channel, if the conversation is relevant, you’ve already introduced yourself, and you’re participating in other ways.
• Obviously, share it over social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram)—this is a well-known route, but ditto above.
• Use Facebook ads to broaden your campaign’s reach.
• Create a QR code for the landing page and put it on a sticker, poster, flyer, or a sample of your work. Then pursue opportunities to get them noticed and into other people’s hands.
• This is intimidating, but it can help your reach: Talk to relevant blogs and related business owners and ask them if they’ll let you write some content (or some other thing you can do for their customers), in exchange for a mention of your service on their website, linking to your landing page. Do not baldly ask them to link to you, and don’t accept merely a post on social media. SEO content and back-link strategies and social media posts are a trade in unequal goods. If you offer something of value that persists, you should get something in return that persists.

If your product/service is ready for traction

After the initial campaign (the first set of visitors) where you’ve caught and ironed out any technological or copy glitches for conversions, start submitting your project to prospective promoters and content aggregators.

Aggregate audiences are enthusiastic about tech, and you might find helpful people there. Concentrate on those closest to your target market. As a coder, one that you probably should have in mind is ProductHunt.

Delay this step if you’re early in the design/build process. Do it when you’re about a month away from being ready, when you’ve got real features to whet their appetite, and an audience you can ask to support you. The reason is that you don’t own that channel or platform, and you might not be able to change or remove it once it’s announced.

Analytics

After setting up more than one landing page, and more than a couple of channels, it helps to create a unique URL for each landing page (which is obvious) and the channel through which it gets seen, so you know what channel is working for you and which one is not. These are called campaign URLs, or UTMs.

Google Analytics has both advice and a tool for creating UTMs. You could also use a social media scheduling tool (like HootSuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, or MeetEdgar) that creates UTMs for each share. Kissmetrics is one that works within apps, if you’re offering an online service.

For all this to have meaning, it assumes your Google Analytics is set up.

You can skip Google Analytics and just rely on WordPress’s JetPack Stats to tell you the basics about your traffic. You could even skip the UTM stuff if you don’t care about the finer details of your sources (JetPack tells you the source of your traffic by domain and country). But it doesn’t hurt to set up your basic Google Analytics anyway, because then at least you’ll have data when you’re ready to learn more.

I once had a conversation with a non-profit webmaster who was quite busy with weekly, sometimes daily, blog postings and events. She had no idea about her reach and traffic, aside from on-forum and in-person group conversations, because she’d never set it up. This was a popular group, and surely she had a much bigger reach than she realized.

Setting up your analytics requires (less than!) a morning or an afternoon to get yourself in, oriented, and get the bits verified. After that, you can let it run without much intervention, and it will give you a wealth of information over time.

So don’t faff around and waste that opportunity, even if most of your traffic is driven by, for example, group members (like the non-profit). Everything is a learning process, so set yourself up to learn. (I would have loved to have known what their demographics were, as we share a customer persona, but she couldn’t tell me.)

Coupled, but not really, with Google Analytics is Search Console. You have to separately submit your root domain URL along with its XML map (you’ll find a WordPress plugin for that). It’s Search Console, not Google Analytics, that tells you the search terms a visitor used to end up on your site. You want to know these keywords, which are particularly useful if you’ll be writing a blog.

The campaign URLs (UTMs) I mentioned above help you see your best communication channels and your conversions. You can check conversions two ways:

• Good: Look at each Landing-page-Channel UTM that registers a hit in your Google Analytics, and then check Mailchimp to see if it resulted in a subscribe. Actually, reverse that: check your Subscribers and then go see their analytics.*

• Better: Set up an Analytics “Behaviour Goal” for when they land on your “Thank You” page (next section). Then you’ll see who (OS, country, demographics) made it through the landing page to actually sign up, and from whence they came.

• with a little digging and the right plug-in, you can make the Signup page part of the subscriber’s info, demonstrating when a campaign worked.

What’s this about a Thank You page?

To entice someone to enter into this email/product/service relationship with you, you may have offered them something more than just notification of when your project is ready.

If so, make it a show of goodwill that they’ll either benefit from now or in the future, or something they’ll truly enjoy. It could be an article, an eBook, access to your list’s previous emails (through a public archive), an event invitation, or something more whimsical.

With or without a freebie, thanking them for subscribing is the proper thing to do. It’s polite. It confirms the action they took succeeded. The fact that it gives you metrics is a convenient bonus.

One of my mailing lists offers an action-packed newsletter (DIY projects, advice Q&A, and resource links), but only after a certain threshold of subscribers have joined. On some of my pop-ups and blog posts, I mention in the CTA that there’s also a freebie. Once they subscribe, the form redirects to my “Thank You” page. Where they see a very large, cute picture of a red squirrel.

Here, this article is long! You deserve a break. Stop and gaze for a moment. I certainly do. Gaze, that is. I have a squirrel house on my property and a range of grey and black squirrels for endless entertainment.

“Well… this is embarrassing. I don’t know quite how to thank you with a freebie yet for joining my mailing list…Oh, wait. Yes, I do.” (Photograph: Steward Ellet/Natural England/PA)

OK, enough gazing.

The Thank You page is also a very opportune place to tell them what to expect from the list: “I’ll/We’ll send you an email…” “once a month, on or around the 14th.” “Somewhere in between two blog posts.” “Every Wednesday.” “Every six weeks.” “On a quarterly basis.” “When we have something big to announce.” Knowing when to expect your mail helps them anticipate the time they’ll spend reading it.

And finally, because of double-opt-in confirmations being a good practice, it should tell them that once they confirm their subscription by email, they’ll receive their freebie in a separate email.

For example, in the copy below the squirrel, I tell them “If you reply to the confirmation email with your postal address, I’ll send you a packet of milkweed seeds.” My particular audience would find this delightful.

Opt-in form submission how-to

Go back to your list integration module or plugin on your WordPress. Each mailing list provider provides HTML code for the opt-in form that you put into your Landing Page. The form submits the data to the mailing list service.

You must set it up at your email service provider (AKA mailing service) that a successful opt-in form submission redirects to a page on your site that says Thank You. Otherwise, a module may (or may not) appear saying “success.”

The Thank You freebie shouldn’t be available for direct download from the Thank You page, because even if you block the URL from being crawled by search engines, it opens you up to diluting the value of your freebie by making it too shareable (consider the effort of forwarding your email to a friend, versus posting the download page in Facebook group. Yeah, that!).

This means you’ll be creating your first Welcome/Onboard automation at your mailing service, that triggers when the subscriber confirms their opt-in.

Note: You could send the freebie without the confirmation step, if you really want to skip it! But that’s not good practice, as Canadian and European legislation mandates clear opt-ins. If you’re marketing to the whole world, make sure your list is compliant. (The United States legislation is opt-out only, which makes people hesitant to share their email addresses.)

The Onboard automation could also ask them for more info about themselves so you can better respond to their interests. Examples I’ve used:

• “I’m interested in what you’re interested in, so if you update your list profile, tell me your hobbies, as well as your region.”
• “We’re designing the software right now, and we have a few questions about where to focus our attention for the greatest impact. Would you kindly answer a short survey?”

How to Avoid the Free = Ick Factor

People expect a little bit of free these days, especially when trying software or information sources. But giving something away for free is still an issue for those of us who need a self-protective way of doing business.

People rightfully hesitate at these “free!” offers. You can’t get the download without the transaction, and so much of what’s “free” ends up being costly in time and attention or worse.

For example, most of us have made the mistake of opting in, then being hit with an email every day for the next two weeks, with an insinuation that we’re holding ourselves back (an insulting form of missing out) if we don’t buy before their deadline. Hard sells are never worth it.

You don’t want to be lumped in with those marketers when you’re offering something out of generosity or curiosity about your target market. And they can be very good at feigning generosity and curiosity towards their targets until time to cash in with a scarcity trap.

If you’re uncomfortable with sharing something of value straight off, try this: Develop a low-commitment preview or freebie, and then offer a promotion for those who are engaged.

E-commerce stores universally offer promo codes. Only give it to the people who are opening your emails, or communicating with you over your other channels. (Keep in mind that people who have iPhones will be “open” by default, even if they aren’t reading your mail. This came with Apple’s iOS 15 email security.)

If your list was a waitlist, don’t cold-announce the launch (“It’s here!”). Talk about the lead-up once or twice in the month before it happens. This will show you who’s engaged. (They don’t need to attend your webinar or launch party to be considered “engaged.” It’s nice, but be reasonable.) Don’t give away promos unless they’ve shown they’re warm.

For casual observers, including the subscribers who don’t open their emails, create or update the landing page on your website that offers it at the price that you think it’s worth. The CTA here would be “Buy” without the promo code.

Then, if you still want to use that page for lead generation, have a delayed pop-up: “Want this at the Friends-and-Family rate? Join us. (Next spaghetti dinner at your house!)”

Avoiding time-wasters (sales prevention)

When using free products as an incentive to join your alpha, beta, or general list, sometimes you have to not get it out there. There are bystanders who enjoy getting freebies, satisfying curiosity, feeling informed. They’re well intentioned, but they’re not your market. At $5 of value, you can afford the publicity and community goodwill, but if it’s something of real cost and value, you’ll need to learn sales prevention.

Imagine you threw a party, and a stranger strolled in and headed right on over to the buffet. At a public event, you might expect that. Party crashers can sometimes be delightful, but their intentions and manners (e.g. zero interest in conversation) quickly show you who’s not.

So we’re back at the beginning again: who is your customer? You have to know you’re serving the people who need it (don’t assume, do customer interviews, and leave some room for surprises).

If you give your stuff away without vetting, you’ll get very little feedback. Fuzzy feedback will result in a product that doesn’t actually serve anyone, or a product they’ll play with, but not buy.

Here’s my case study: I was bored of seeing life-advice-on-the-internet and 300+ page bestsellers of writing prompts. Endless ponderous nonsense, only some of it good. I thought it would be a lot more action-oriented if I designed a life-planning workbook with 3 monthly agendas. I had a budget of $1000, so it was a limited print run. And I gave it away in exchange for a promise of design feedback.

But people who don’t use agendas, or who’ve tried but never stuck with one, ordered it anyway, out of curiosity or sheer impulsivity. They didn’t provide any feedback, so I’m sure several hundred dollars of paper went into the recycling. That was my fault for not filtering them out.

What I should have done for those people, which I later did, was an automated email series to walk them through the workbook without having the workbook. A motivated journaller would have gotten value out of it.

So what’s a reasonable sales prevention technique?

That’s relatively easy: it’s copy written to tell the reader the exact problem they’re having and how you’re solving it, that doesn’t try to alleviate any reasonable doubt that they’re the intended customer, so they can self-select out.

That kind of specificity is strangely absent from catch-all high-ticket marketing (who also distract by offering money-back guarantees that are often more specific than what they’re promising).

You could use a survey for this purpose, where the end of the survey is either an opt-in or a polite “no thanks” on either side.

If they’re design targets or beta testers, you can send them a final step (e.g. to join a Slack community, or a GitHub project for the code) in their List Confirmation email. This can ascertain they’re ready for the two-way street of communication (giving access to the project specifically so you can observe or solicit feedback).

Build in obstacles. If they’re ordering a free product, then at least charge the shipping. (Or invert that: sell the product, ship for free!) If what you’re offering for free isn’t worth the $10 shipping, they’re not gonna take it seriously. Lesson learned.

A customer that has to invest in trying your solution will efficiently provide feedback about how it works, if it works at all. And if it really works? This is the customer who’ll buy and provide testimonials—and future customers.

Also keep in mind: people pay for things they don’t use all the time. Building a revenue model for your product is important for your business.

Multiple Offerings and List Groups

Hopefully, your new product or project is a stand-alone and you won’t need to group your subscribers. But if you work on multiple projects at a time, you may be juggling different groups.

I had two mailing lists for two different websites. One list was segmented into groups. One group was onboarded into a course-by-email, and another got a monthly PDF (the example I show in the accompanying video). Another group only heard from me when I made progress on a separate project.

Your landing pages have to be simple and targeted, so don’t batch the subscribers all together in your emails, talking about all the things you do. It confuses readers more than it helps anyone. Write to the groups separately (or, once your skills are advanced, use merge fields to show or hide email content depending on their group).

It can be difficult to assign new subscribers into the appropriate groups. You could do so based on the page that they opted in on. You can also ask them if they’re interested in more than one type of email.

Explore your email service provider to see how they recognize the page source of the signup, and how you can automate to put that subscriber into one of your groups.

A good multi-purpose plugin will make it as easy as possible for someone to sign up and get in the right group the first time.

In the accompanying video, I use the "MailChimp for WordPress" plugin to create a simple form for a landing page:

MC4WP's forms builder. You can see it in the accompanying video.

I then updated the form to one that has the list groups by project. I made it obvious which one they were about to join:

A group-sorting opt-in form, with the default group highlighted

If the short code (…id="220") for this form is in multiple places in the website, they will all update upon saving the changes.

Test your form on multiple devices and browsers after every plugin or WordPress update. If your form doesn’t work, they’ll bounce.

Final Advice for Beta Testers, and the Video Intro

Before we get to the (optional: WordPress-Mailchimp-oriented) video, there’s a last bit of context that you might need.

If you’re using lead generation to find and stay in touch with alpha/beta testers of your project, the mailing list is necessary, but it is not enough. You’ll want to be in touch with them for design feedback.

If it’s a product, make sure they order it through your e-commerce module (one final obstacle that anyone can manage), and not via private communication (why would they evade the transaction? Red flag!). Collect and pass their information from the module through to Mailchimp.

And keep their details in a notebook, spreadsheet, email folder, etc. Reach out to them and set up phone, Skype, and Facetime conversations. Why? Because for real issues that affect your work, you have to interview these collaborative customers, sometimes more than once.

The video (from 2018) illustrates how you can set up a landing page, set up the welcome automations, and these attendant features:

• how WooCommerce integrates with MailChimp (for ecommerce orders for physical products or for downloads where you get paid)
• what MailChimp looks like when you’re using groups or segments for automating messages and campaigns,
• a demonstration of creating a landing page, using a MailChimp plugin to generate forms that use shortcodes (which can update changes across your site)
• MailChimp’s own landing page generator
• and finally, an intro to email automation.

In Conclusion

My dear fellow idea/product creators and web developers, I now present you with the summary of the things I just explained.

This article was about getting to know the people who are going to try out and adopt your idea, by getting them into a relationship with you. You’ll not only be learning how to address their needs with the thing you’re developing, but also where you can find them, and how they want to be communicated with.

Your communication is part of your Value Proposition as much as your product at this point. Everything is iterative, and you’ll learn as you go. Fortunately, a landing page is something people expect for just about any endeavour.

Create a landing page connected to your mailing list (not your social, not your home page) that tells people about the project and how it will help them. Induce them to get on the list— unless it’s not for them. Make sure your opt-ins are clear and, depending on the value you’re proposing, pre-qualified.

To increase your opt-ins, offer people something useful or delightful right now. Those bonuses or previews, and the mail you send after opt-in, creates and builds a relationship with them. In that light, make sure you can be reached by the lists’ reply-to address.

Use other channels such as partnership opportunities and events to raise your profile and direct people to your landing page. Use different copywriting for different channels.

Use different landing pages for different “Ideal Customer” personas and different goals (for example: sign up to the waitlist; download the app; beta-test; buy).

Set up your analytics so that once you start gaining traction–especially when aggregators and others promote your work–you’ll be able to know where they came from, what their demographics are, and what campaigns are working.

Treat your subscribers like clients and friends: be available to them, write to them in a personable manner, and keep it concise, helpful, meaningful, and enjoyable. Do not chase click metrics: chase providing value.

If they’re alpha or beta testers, reach out to them in person, ask non-leading questions, and follow up on any issues raised.

Finally, if you’re in the channels where your customers can be found, and these methods don’t get you the traction your project needs, that’s incredibly valuable information. Quit it sooner rather than later! You can pivot, or abandon it and start over again. You now know how.

Jane Sorensen has always been a multi-disciplinarian. She writes the words, takes the pictures, handles the money, and drives the emergency backup Zamboni. If you’d like a dose of practical low-carbon lifestyle, DIY projects, and ecological gardening and wildlife enthusiasm, check out her blog at bigcitylittlehomestead.ca.

We'll answer these questions and more. You'll get a manager-level crash course in augmented analytics. By the end of this article, you should have a solid understanding of what augmented analytics is, and how you can use it to improve your decision making.

What is augmented analytics?

Augmented analytics is a term used to describe the use of machine learning to automatically analyze data, then provide insights that humans can act on.

It’s sometimes also referred to as “cognitive analytics” or “analytics 2.0.”

How do augmented analytics work?

Augmented analytics rely on machine learning algorithms.

Machine learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows computers to learn directly from data – without the need for a human to programming them. (That is, there's no need for a human to explicitly tell the computers what to do.)

Machine learning algorithms can automatically detect patterns in data, then use that to make predictions about future events.

What are the benefits of augmented analytics?

There are several benefits of using augmented analytics, including:

1. Automation of tedious and time-consuming tasks. Augmented analytics can automate the more rote aspects of data analysis, freeing managers to focus on the higher-level considerations, including a lot of domain-specific considerations.

2. Improved accuracy. By using machine learning algorithms, augmented analytics can provide more accurate insights than humans alone could. Computers are much better at crunching numbers than humans are. And humans are better at interpreting the underlying meaning of those numbers.

3. Increased speed. Augmented analytics can help managers make faster decisions by providing real-time insights. Imagine automatically refreshing dashboards that you can reference whenever you need to make a decision.

4. Increased scalability. You can easily scale up your augmented analytics to support larger organizations, or incorporate a broader array of data sources.

Which Industries Use Augmented Analytics?

Here are a few examples of industries that have embraced augmented analytics:

Augmented Analytics in Retail

In the retail industry, you can use augmented analytics to automatically analyze customer data and identify trends. If you can anticipate what customers are likely to buy, you can make better decisions about product assortment, pricing, and promotions.

Augmented Analytics in Manufacturing

In the manufacturing industry, managers use augmented analytics to automatically analyze data from sensors and machine data to identify issues and optimize production.

Imagine a factory where you know the exact state of every assembly line, the output of every human worker, or even the power usage of individual machines. Imagine being able to identify bottlenecks or waste through real-time dashboards.

There is a lot of room for applying Augmented Analytics tools to save money. So we see manufacturers like Toyota, Apple, and Airbus all making heavy use of these tools.

Automated Analytics in Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, doctors and managers can use augmented analytics to automatically analyze patient data, identify vital sign trends, and improve patient care.

Healthcare in particular has a lot of room for improvement in understanding medical records, and making better decisions based on available data. Augmented Analytics can give hospitals a big leg up.

Automated Analytics in Financial Services

There is perhaps no more obvious use of automated analytics than in finance. Numbers are an intrinsic part of moving money around between investors and companies deploying that money.

Because finance involves money, it is a magnet for fraudulent activity. Automated Analytics can help banks and other parties prevent fraud. They can also help governments prevent money laundering.

Automated Analytics in Marketing

Marketers can use augmented analytics to automatically analyze customer data to identify trends and improve marketing campaigns.

When you are spending money on advertising, even marginal refinements can improve your bottom line.

In short: Automated Analytics can help managers focus on what they do best, while offloading the grunt work to computers

Thanks for taking time to read my article. I hope you have fun exploring the world of Automated Analytics. If you're looking to harness technology tools, you can learn some new programming and computer science skills here on freeCodeCamp.org.

Building an app is a difficult task in itself. From conceptualization, to market research, design, and development, it takes a whole lot of resources.

But if you are making something for the public, you know building it is only half of the work, right? If you want your app to reach as many people as possible, you will have to take another step: marketing.

Marketing is another beast altogether. And, it needs as much commitment as building the app. It's something you need to tackle even in the earliest stages of app development.

But the problem that plagues most solo developers is, "Where do I get the money?"

Traditional marketing does require quite a bit of cash. Advertising is one of the most lucrative industries, after all. Still, there must be something the rest of us cash-strapped individuals can do, right?

Of course there is. If you are on a limited budget, here are a couple of tips to get you started with marketing your masterpiece of an app.

Be Active on Social Media

No matter what your app is about, most of your audience will be on social media. And leveraging social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your app.

Seven out of ten American adults use some form of social media. Among them, the most popular platforms are YouTube (81%) and Facebook (71%).

You can sign up to all the basic social media platforms free of charge and craft your campaigns from there.

Social media makes it easier for potential users to find your app and see what it’s about. These platforms are an avenue for people to interact, giving you a direct line to your audience.

It is also a great avenue to answer questions and interact with users. When done well, social media marketing can build up your reputation. It can also generate word-of-mouth marketing.

Creative social media campaigns can generate a lot of buzz around your app. A lot of brands and apps have surged in popularity due to well-executed campaigns.

To launch a successful campaign, you will need some good market research. It's a good thing that most social media platforms will give you access to your account analytics.

It's a good practice to keep your eye on it, as your analytics provide a wealth of information. It shows which posts gain the most attention, your audience demographics, among others.

All these for an initial payment of $0. If you have the budget, you can transition to paid ads to target your desired audience and get more buzz.

Create a Website or Blog

Building a website is one of the most established ways to promote online. It gives users a one-stop-shop to get acquainted with your app and its many facets. A self-titled domain also gives your app more credibility.

You can add different pages describing your app and its features. Maintaining a blog is also an excellent way to provide updates and boost your search engine rankings.

But as most of us know, building and hosting a website can cost some money. If you're on a tight budget, don't worry, you still have some choices.

Many websites offer free website building and hosting, which can fit a variety of needs. Some popular examples are WordPress, Wix, and Weebly. Building a website on WordPress is as easy as 1,2,3, as evidenced by the screenshots below.

Their free services will add their brand to your site domain. So your web address will be appname.wordpress.com, for example. If you want your own domain name, you will need to pay a monthly fee.

Still, you can check out their website builders, which are pretty user-friendly. You can use their drag-and-drop features for a more convenient experience. But if you want, you can also access the code for more control.

Image source: unsplash.com

Reach Out to Influencers

With the popularity of social media, influencer marketing has seen a steady rise.
What are influencers, anyway? Influencers are social media users with a significant following. Due to their established audience, they become an attractive avenue for advertising.

A majority of marketing companies have a standalone content marketing budget. Seventy-five percent of them intend to have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing.

Most influencers have followers that trust and admire their lifestyle and choices. Partnering with an influencer is an excellent way to add social proof. It can also build your app's reputation.

There is a whole lot more to influencer marketing. You will need to take some thought when selecting who you want to promote your app.

Selecting influencers you're going to work with requires you to know your audience. Look for someone within the same demographic or someone who has the same interests.

More popular influencers often charge a more significant fee. So if you're on a budget, you might want to look at ones with a smaller yet still considerable following.

Working with smaller influencers or micro-influencers is not a bad thing. Micro-influencers are a popular choice among brands today.

Prominent influencers are now more like celebrities. Micro-influencers have fewer followers but often come across as more genuine. They can make organic content with a more robust audience connection.

People rely a lot on word of mouth when making purchases. They are more likely to follow the advice of someone they trust. Micro-influencers have this kind of relationship with their audience. Working with them can add a boost to your app.

Get Your App Featured

When it comes to promotion, nothing beats a feature from a trusted media outlet. It's one of the best ways to reach even more casual internet users.

This is where you and your team's PR skills come in. You will need to write pitches that you can send to websites where you want your app featured.

To get higher chances of approval, do some research about these websites first. What kind of content do they usually produce? What writing styles do they use? Tailor your pitch around these factors.

You can also reach out to official review sites and ask them to do a feature on your app. If you've already released your app, you could provide them with a download link. If it's still under development, you could offer demo videos and high-quality screenshots.

Some other ways to get featured are through podcasts, vlogs, or other media. Reaching out can be pretty time-consuming, so get your networking skills ready!

Work on Your App Store Optimization

On Google Play alone, there are already 3.48 million apps. How do you stand out from an ocean of competition?

App Store Optimization (ASO) is one of the things to consider when promoting your app. It is like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but for app stores.

Your marketing campaigns may be top-notch. Still, without ASO, you're missing out on most of your audience. A significant 70% of users find apps via app store search. Furthermore, 65% of downloads happen right after a search.

What does this mean? Pay attention to your ASO. If you can, create a campaign around it, but here are some key factors you should pay attention to.

• App Name. It needs to be catchy and relevant to your app's features.
• App description. Make sure to incorporate relevant keywords to help your app rank higher.
• Icon. Create an eye-catching icon that will attract users.
• Screenshots and videos. Prepare short videos and attractive screenshots that show your app at its best.
• Ratings and reviews. User feedback matters. Many users look at reviews before downloading, so keep up your customer service!

One last thing for ASO: Do your research and look at the top apps on Google Play right now. How did they structure their app page to attract and sustain the most users?

You can use a nifty tracker from the similarweb Blog to look at the most downloaded apps on Google Play. Data is an excellent way to study the factors that affect an app's performance.

Final Words

We can never deny that funding makes a lot of things easier. But if you lack in this department, creativity can go a long way.

There are tons of ways to promote your app. Some of them cost money, but you can make up for it with some skill and hard work. Make do with what you have and can gain success from it.

While there's no exact science that dictates the best possible times to share content on Instagram throughout time zones and disciplines, there are strategies you can use. And there are certain times and windows that seem to be consistently better than others.

In this article, we'll use the freeCodeCamp Instagram account as an example – since I run it, I'm the most familiar with its behavior and trends.

I'll share my reasoning behind our timing strategies along with what works best for us. I'll also discuss some general advice about posting times and how you can decide when to share your content.

Let's get started.

What's the best time to post to Instagram, in general?

As I mentioned above, there's not really a universally right or wrong time to post to Instagram. It depends on your audience, your goals, where you're located, and many other factors. But let's try to get some insights.

First, some data:

A graph showing how many posts people share in various time slots throughout the day (Source)

This is a very general graph, but you can see that there tend to be the most posts between around 9am and 6pm. This makes sense, as people are generally awake and active during those hours.

To get a little more insight into when people post and why, let's dive in deeper.

Put yourselves in your audience's shoes

Alright, let's think about this logically. Perhaps, if you're an Instagram user, think of your own behavior on the app.

If you're a somewhat typical user, you likely check IG right when you wake up. Nothing like a little shot of inspiration/FOMO/political commentary to start off the day right.

Then, when you're eating lunch, you probably open up the app again to check out all the juicy goodness that's been shared while you were working or doing other things all morning.

As your day winds down, and your brain becomes tired or distracted from work or taking care of kids or job hunting – or however you spend your days – you might check in with Instagram again just to escape and browse for a minute.

See what I'm getting at? People tend to check Instagram before work, when they need a break, or when they want inspiration or information.

Of course, Instagram isn't always restful – many people use it for active learning, sharing their art, consuming and sharing information about politics and social justice, and so on.

But it's up to you to know your audience. Whether you're posting travel photos or tech tutorials, think about who might be interested in those images or videos and when they might be browsing the app.

How to choose the best times to post to Instagram

Now that you've thought about who might be viewing your posts (and whom you want to view those posts), let's talk about some general trends in Instagram viewership. I'll focus on the tech and education spheres, since those are where freeCodeCamp lives.

First of all, here's something to keep in mind: if you have a relatively global audience – meaning your viewers are spread all over the world – it matters less when you post. Or rather, you can't cater to all time zones at once. If you can figure out where most of your audience is, or even a small majority, focus on times that are ideal for that area.

This is one strategy I follow. I live on the west coast of the United States, and there are many people in the States that engage with freeCodeCamp in some way (whether through the curriculum, publication, forum, YouTube channel, or our social media channels).

Part of freeCodeCamp's strategy is that we don't schedule posts ahead of time. I like to keep the content fresh and current, and I post to freeCodeCamp's account a few times a week.

By way of planning, I simply reach out to the people who's posts I want to re-share, and ask their permission to do so. Once I've gotten it, I add that post's URL to a spreadsheet so I can keep track of which posts I've shared and when.

Now the main question – once I have my planned posts, when do I share them?

Well, I think about the factors I've discussed above, and here's my general strategy.

Focus on weekdays

I want to catch people when they're studying or working or doing something from which they might need a little break. A little zap of inspiration. Most of the content I share on freeCodeCamp's IG account is being re-shared, so it's content someone else has created and posted.

I do this, in part, to show the global nature of the freeCodeCamp community. Many of the images I share feature developers and new coders who have used or are using the freeCodeCamp curriculum to learn to code. And people are doing that everywhere, so I want our Instagram feed to reflect that.

So throughout the week, around lunchtime (Pacific Time), I share photos of people coding, photos of people's setups, and photos of people learning to code. That way, when a person scrolling through their feed sees something that freeCodeCamp has shared, they hopefully receive a jolt of positivity, inclusivity, support, and inspiration.

Focus on daytime

As an additional note, I do try to share content when a large part of the world is awake.

Of course, not everyone will be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (as my mom says) when I post, but the goal is to give as many people as possible an opportunity to see the image before the world of IG moves on and floods people's feeds with too many more posts.

Think about the days of the week

Lastly, I think about what people's schedules might be like. I realize that I don't have a completely typical schedule, but I admittedly use myself as a case study.

I generally work Monday-Friday, and spend my weekends focusing on other things. Sometimes something work-related requires my attention on a Saturday or Sunday, but I try to stick to a regular schedule.

When I start the week on Monday, my inboxes are quite full, various repeating tasks demand my attention, and I have a meeting or two. Tuesday is often much the same.

By Wednesday, I'm pretty much caught up and can work on larger projects or other tasks that aren't so time-sensitive.

Thursdays and Fridays are also more free-form and I often have time to write articles for freeCodeCamp's publication and catch up on backlogs.

All this being said, I'll generally share images on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and then again on Thursdays or Fridays. It fits in nicely with my work schedule, and I imagine that other people find time on those days to check IG once or twice.

Turns out that these times are fairly ideal – people seem to use Instagram a lot on Wednesdays and Fridays (in the tech sphere, especially), and lunchtime is a popular time for perusing.

I check in on each post throughout the day after I post, and then a day or so later, to see how much engagement it's gotten. If it has over 1000 likes and at least 5-10 comments, I know it's done quite well.

Ok, so when should you NOT post to Instagram?

I've been discussing how I strategize and figure out when I should post to Instagram. But how do you determine when you shouldn't?

Well, I did some research, and the general consensus is that Sundays are the worst time. Fewer people use the app and share during that time, which makes sense if you think about it.

In my house, Sundays are often used to get done everything you didn't do during the week. Or, barring that, to decompress and rejuvenate before starting anew. I don't spend a lot of time on social media on the weekends in general, and sometimes I'm just tapped out on screens by the time Saturday and Sunday roll around.

Other than Sundays, there doesn't seem to be one day that, across the board, is bad for Instagram views and engagement. This is where you'll need to do some research specific to your situation.

Figure out your own ideal posting times

You can also go through this mental process – thinking about your audience's potential schedules, cross-referencing with your own, and so on. It might take some trial and error, but keep track of the results and you'll be able to hone your strategy.

But perhaps you know that most of your audience is in a certain geographical area. Then you should do some research on when people use Instagram in your region, or country, and base your posting schedule off that (as it makes sense for you or your brand).

Here are some generalizations to think about as you conduct your research and figure out a posting schedule (again, based on the tech world):

• Weekdays tend to bring about higher engagement
• Sometimes you can catch people when they first wake up, so early morning can work
• Lunch time is pretty reliable, as many people check/browse their phones as they eat
• Later in the workday is also decent, as people get tired of work/whatever they've been doing all day and need a break
• Sundays tend to be relatively quiet in IG land

Do you have data that you've gathered about the best times to post to Instagram? If you share it with us, we might be able to include it in this article :) Just reach out on Twitter.

Good luck reaching as many people as you can with your Instagram content!

• Creating our content for the masses
• What do I mean by building an audience?
• Leveraging larger platforms and publications
• Syndicating with other platforms
• Contributing to other publications
• Sharing on content curation platforms
• Other notable places

Creating our content for the masses

Every content creator has been there – you just wrote an article that you're super excited about and think it's going to be a massive hit. But you quickly find that overnight success never came when you wake up hoping to find thousands of likes on the tweet only to find none.

But that might not have anything to do with your article. It could absolutely be groundbreaking, but unfortunately there's not many people around to see it.

Social networks don't tend to prioritize their feeds based on how good your article is, but how much interaction and engagement that post received. While that kind of makes sense, that doesn't play well for people just starting out.

So how do we expand that reach? While the obvious route is to buy your way to the top with ads, I'm going to focus on more natural ways we can build our audience.

What do I mean by building an audience?

Your favorite web developers or social media influencers didn't start with 100,000 followers – most of them worked really hard to get where they are. That process is what building an audience is all about.

By creating content, you're working to find others who enjoy your take or get inspired by it. Ideally, those same people will follow you on their favorite platform with the hope that your next piece will inspire them just the same.

Your audience is those people who followed you or are actively engaging with the content you create. The ones who are supporting you by giving a thumbs up to your new video. The ones who subscribe to your newsletter because they're eager to see the awesome work you did that week.

By working hard on your content, being consistent, and finding your voice, you'll naturally build that audience. But to build that audience, people first need to see it. So how can we get it in front of people?

Leveraging larger platforms and publications

While your new blog might not have anyone subscribed to your RSS feed, there are platforms out there with large audiences that are actively looking for more authors.

By leveraging these audiences, you're helping to get your foot in the door. While you might need to give up a little bit of ownership of the article by writing it somewhere that's not your own blog, you're providing a means for more people to read your content and find out who you are.

This process can take many forms, but I'm going to focus on a few things:

• Syndicating with other platforms
• Contributing to other publications
• Sharing on content curation platforms

Syndicating with other platforms

Syndicating your content can be one of the more effective means of getting access to a larger network while holding on to a lot of the benefits of hosting your own content.

Not all platforms are the same, but most of the ones I'm going to go over allow you to provide a canonical link to your own website. What this does is allow you to publish your work on different platforms all while the "SEO juice" ultimately flows back to your own blog.

While it's important from an SEO perspective, it's also generally a good way to keep your content hosted on your own website where you know you'll maintain it for the foreseeable future. If one of those platforms ends up closing down, you still have all of your content safe at home.

So what are some platforms that we can syndicate with and how can you set it up?

Dev.to

Dev.to is the choice platform for developers who want to share their knowledge and open up conversation to the larger tech community. They provide an incredibly welcoming and safe space where developers experienced and new can publish their work.

The great part about it is that everyone seems to get a bit of a fair chance at getting their work out to the world. While they have similar features to other networks where you can follow your favorite authors, newer authors still show up in the content feed giving you a chance to be seen.

To syndicate on dev.to, you'll want to set up the canonical link in the post configuration. When editing the content, you'll want to look for the settings icon, where you'll then be provided with an input where you can add the original URL for your post.

Adding a canonical URL to a dev.to post

Medium

Medium has suffered a lot of criticism lately due to its aggressive tactics and monetization strategies, but it's still an effective platform for newcomers who don't have an audience to get in front of.

Medium's large network of users and content curation makes it a great platform for expanding your reach. But it doesn't stop at posting there.

To be effective with your Medium posts, you want to look to get published with an existing Medium publication. Better Programming is one of the larger developer publications that are always looking for new authors to contribute.

Submitting to a Medium publication will help you take advantage of not only Medium's network, but that publication's network that gives you a better chance of getting selected by Medium's curation team and landing in someone's newsletter inbox.

Adding a canonical link to your Medium posts is a bit trickier though. To do this, you must "import" your story rather than copy and pasting it in. The good news, is Medium also tries to import all of the content, ideally making it a bit easier to add (remember to review all of the formatting!).

On your Stories page, you can find the Import button.

Importing a story on Medium

Once it's imported, you won't really be able to see much, but once you preview the page, you can view the source and find the canonical link added.

Canonical link in Medium post source

Contributing to other publications

While you might have to give up ownership of your content, writing for other publications or writing as a "guest post" is a great way to get started and gain some ground where you might not have had any before.

Depending on the publisher, you might not ever get the opportunity to post it on your own website, but you're trading that for the privilege to get your work out to potentially millions of people instead of the 10 unique visitors from the month of May.

This can even open up the door to more opportunities. This helps give your name recognition and authority that can help in your job search or simply another chance to write for the same publisher or a different bigger one.

The good news – is there's an endless supply of big name publishers that you can submit your work to. Here are a few you can get started with:

• freeCodeCamp News
• Smashing Magazine
• CSS-Tricks
• Sitepoint
• Tuts+
• Web Designer Depot
• DZone
• Pluralsight Guides (See "Teach" in footer)

Each of these publications have different processes of getting published. So be patient and keep working hard at your content.

Note: know of another publisher that offers writing opportunities? Let me know and I'll add them above!

Sharing on content curation platforms

It would be great if we all had a massive Twitter following where we could post about our new blog, but that's typically not the case. So while you should absolutely set up a social media profile and get your content out there, I'll focus on other platforms here.

Reddit

Though there are certainly rules about self-promotion depending on the subreddit, Reddit's a massive community of real people who are curious and eager to learn about something new.

Learn about the different tech or webdev subreddits that are out there. Start getting involved with other people's posts. Develop a relationship with the people there and show why your content has value.

Hacker News

Hacker News is tough. It's hard to get noticed and on the front page. And even when you get on the front page, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of criticism you never expected to get.

But if you can have thick skin and learn to take the heat should you get noticed, Hacker News can be an incredible way to broadcast to the world. People have turned into overnight successes by ending up on the front page of Hacker News whether they're the ones who posted it there or not.

More platforms

While those are two of the big ones, there are a ton more. Here are a few more to get you started:

• Echo JS
• RubyFlow
• Golang News
• Web Designer News

Other notable places

Chat-based Communities

There are a ton of communities using platforms like Slack or Discord that are incredibly supportive in helping each other grow. While you shouldn't simply spam your content, try to start a conversation around it. Talk about why the topic is important to you or how your tutorial can help others in their code journey.

Newsletters

This is something a lot of people regret not starting earlier – myself included. It's not too much effort to start a newsletter with a platform that has a free tier and keep it in your back pocket until you see some growth. No one's going to judge you for waiting a few months to put out content, but once you begin to grow your audience, they'll be excited to see all of your new work.

Other people's newsletters

You don't have to have your own newsletter to get into someone's inbox, there are already a ton of newsletter curators doing a lot of hard work to find great content around the web, but if they don't see it, how can they include it?

Most newsletter publications love to receive submissions. This helps their publication grow and include content from people who might not have a good opportunity on their own.

While you can Google around and find a newsletter that makes sense for you, here are a few that I follow along with that I know would love to see your work:

• All Cooperpress Publications including Javascript Weekly, Serverless Status, and a bunch more
• Web Tools Weekly
• CSS Weekly

Building your "brand"

"Brand" is a funny word and can come sometimes come with negative connotations. But really as an author, your goal should be to build a presence that you carry with you consistently through all of your different outlets of work.

For instance, when possible, try to always use the same username when creating author profiles. You can find me mostly anywhere at @colbyfayock – it makes it easy for people to find me on a new network.

Also try to use the same picture. While it's definitely fun to customize your different profiles depending on who's there, the benefit of using the same picture is people will come to recognize you by that picture. They'll instantly be able to remember they saw your blog post when they see your tweet come through their feed.

Be patient, your time will come

You're not going to find an overnight success without spending a lot of money, so be patient. Content development is hard, it takes time to both build an audience and figure out your voice.

But chances are, if this is your first article you've ever written, maybe that first publisher you sent it to wasn't interested in it.

THAT'S OKAY! Don't give up! Send it to another publisher and try the original one for your next article. When I first started out, it took a few articles before I got accepted as an author to freeCodeCamp's Medium publication.

The more you write, the more you'll learn about what's effective. It's not a sprint – be patient and just keep up the hard work.

Overcoming the fear of sharing your work

Most of these things aren't easy to do. The idea that you might have to face critical feedback of your work is absolutely scary!

But overcoming this fear is an important step of the process. I personally struggled with this when I began writing, but the more you put yourself our there, the less scary it becomes and you'll quickly notice there aren't as many bad people out there looking to say bad things about your work.

Instead, you're opening yourself up to an opportunity to learn and grow. Though not everyone's the same, the tech community can be overwhelmingly welcoming and supportive. The more you share and put yourself out there, the more receptive people will be to wanting to hear what you have to say.

How do you share your work?

Let me know on Twitter!

Amidst the economic devastation of COVID-19, online businesses have become dependent on SEO now more than ever. Times like these illustrate the power and importance of Search Engine Optimization.

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of increasing quantity and quality of traffic to a web page through organic search engine results. Organic search results are derived from an internal algorithm of the search engine and not the result of paid advertising. Below is a list of related terminology.

• SERP or Search Engine Results Page is simply the results page that drive clicks. These pages include a combination of paid search results and organic.
• SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on SERPs.
• PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.

Learning SEO basics and more advanced topics can be a bewildering process. In this post we'll take a look at simple steps to help create SEO friendly web pages and tools to maintain them.

Relevant and Meaningful Content

The most important driver of an SEO friendly website is unique, relevant, and meaningful content. Although this seems obvious, it's easier to mess up than get right.

A deep understanding of the website's users is crucial in mastering content creation. Content that establishes a strong connection to the user will boost interaction and reduce bounce rate. Search engines recognize time users spend on a website and levels of interaction.

Don't get too clever. SEO isn't a card game in which you need to outsmart the opponent. "Over-optimizing" is a term that describes age-old techniques that attempt to trick search engines, like "link stuffing" and "content stuffing" for example. In the past, some tricks were proven effective, but they were ultimately short-lived.

Keyword strategy can lead to SEO success when done correctly. Finding the right balance between keyword usage and subject relevance is crucial in achieving this success.

Variety in content and format is an effective way to hold attention. A rich set of content including imagery, video, tables and lists will captivate those eyeballs.

Organizing content in a logical website hierarchy is another fundamental aspect in creating an SEO friendly website. Google's Search Console Help page "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide" provides an elaborate guide in organizing content.

Semantic Markup and Structured Data

Well-constructed content is key for SEO along with well constructed code that our browsers and search engines use to interpret content.

Many HTML tags have semantic meaning that help interpreters understand and classify types of content. As web developers, we sometimes feel powerless in the marketing-heavy world of SEO, but writing semantic markup is one of the most impactful tools in our tool belt.

Why write every HTML element as a div when we have a full spectrum of tags to identify different types of content. Below are some of the more useful semantic tags.

• Page titles
• Page descriptions
• Paragraphs
• Lists
• Articles
• Sections
• Headers
• Footers
• Etc, etc

Again, it's important to be clever authoring HTML, but not too clever. A well-balanced sprinkling of shared keywords across titles, descriptions, h1s and h2s can go a long way. Titles and descriptions should be unique between pages and relevant in content.

Structured data is a newer data format, following the JSON-LD specification, that can be embedded on HTML pages. Search engines like Google interpret structured data to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general as explained in "Understand how structured data works". Below is a simple example.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Foo Software | Website Quality Monitoring",
  "url": "https://www.foo.software",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/www.foo.software",
    "https://www.instagram.com/foosoftware/",
    "https://github.com/foo-software",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/foo-software"
  ]
}
</script>

Website Accessibility and Performance

Search engines will surely continue to raise the bar for acceptable web standards. In 2018 Google announced the beginning of its migration to mobile-first indexing and expanded by announcing mobile-first indexing for the whole web in 2020. Web page performance and accessibility encompass user-centric metrics that can ultimately impact SEO.

Website performance captures the user journey, marking various moments of the user experience. Below are important performance metrics.

• First contentful paint (FCP): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page's content is rendered on the screen.
• Largest contentful paint (LCP): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when the largest text block or image element is rendered on the screen.
• First input delay (FID): measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site (i.e. when they click a link, tap a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction.
• Time to Interactive (TTI): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when it's visually rendered, its initial scripts (if any) have loaded, and it's capable of reliably responding to user input quickly.
• Total blocking time (TBT): measures the total amount of time between FCP and TTI where the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness.
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS): measures the cumulative score of all unexpected layout shifts that occur between when the page starts loading and when its lifecycle state changes to hidden.

Website accessibility is another important concept to keep in mind when building a search engine optimized website. Not only are there a variety of humans reading our websites, but also a variety of machines like screen-readers doing the same.

Improving accessibility makes your site more useable for everyone. ~ Addy Osami | Accessibility tips for web developers

SEO Tools

In this post we've taken a look at ways to improve SEO, but how do we maintain these standards over time? Many tools can help us analyze and monitor SEO.

Foo’s Automated Lighthouse Check monitors quality of web pages with Lighthouse. It provides detailed SEO, performance, and accessibility reporting. Free and premium plans are available.

Automated Lighthouse Check dashboard

Google Search Console is a must have for any website owner who cares about SEO. It provides insight into which search terms are receiving organic traffic and a granular level of analysis. You can filter by location, device and more.

Google Search Console performance dashboard

Conclusion

SEO is not an easy practice to master, but among the trending tricks of the trade that come and go over time, the most effective approach should come naturally. Meaningful, well formed content combined with well formed code, delivered in a performant, accessible way will surely appease the SEO gods.

• What is Open Graph?
• Why do I need it?
• What happens if I don’t have it?
• Starting with the basics of open graph
• Website open graph type
• Some other open graph tags that are worth adding
• Twitter and other social media networks using open graph
• Images in open graph
• Testing your open graph tags
• Can I get an example?

What is Open Graph?

Open Graph is an internet protocol that was originally created by Facebook to standardize the use of metadata within a webpage to represent the content of a page.

Within it, you can provide details as simple as the title of a page or as specific as the duration of a video. These pieces all fit together to form a representation of each individual page of the internet.

Why do I need it?

Content on the internet is typically created with at least one goal in mind -- to share it with others. This might not necessarily matter if you’re just sending it to one friend, but if you want to share it or want it to be shared on any social network or app that utilizes rich previews, you’ll want that preview to be as effective as possible.

This will help encourage people to check out your content and inevitably click through to your content.

What happens if I don’t have it?

Most social networks by default will try to make their best effort in creating a preview of your content. This more often than not doesn’t go so well.

Take for instance my website colbyfayock.com.

Example of a simple Twitter Card

It correctly grabs the title of my page and the description, but it's not the most enticing looking tweet in a feed.

Contrast that to the preview of a single post and we see a different story.

Example of a Twitter Card with a large image

So what happens if you don’t have open graph tags? Nothing bad will happen, but you won’t be taking advantage of some of the features that help make your content stand out next to the loads of other content getting posted on the internet.

Starting with the basics of open graph

The four basic open graph tags that are required for each page are og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url. These tags should be unique for each page you serve, meaning your homepage’s tags should all be different from your blog post article’s page.

Anatomy of a Twitter Card using Open Graph tags

While it should be pretty straightforward, here’s a breakdown of what each of the tags mean:

• og:title: The title of your page. This is typically the same as your webpage's <title> tag unless you’d like to present it differently.
• og:type: The “type” of website you have. I’ll explain more in the next section, though a generic “type” is “website”.
• og:image: This should be a link to an image that you’d like to represent your content. It should be a high resolution image that the social networks will use in their feeds.
• og:url: This should be the URL of the current page.

When placing a tag on your website, you should place it in the <head> along with any other metadata. The tag used will be a <meta> tag and should look like this pattern:

<meta property=“[NAME]” content=“[VALUE]” />

So if I were to create a set four basic open graph tags for my website, colbyfayock.com, it might look like:

<meta property="og:title" content="Colby Fayock - A UX Designer &amp; Front-end Developer Blog" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:image" content="/static/website-social-card-44070c4a901df708aa1563ac4bbe595a.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.colbyfayock.com" />

Website open graph type

The open graph protocol has a few variations of the “type” of website it supports. This includes types like website, article, or video.

When setting up your open graph tags, you’ll want to have an idea of which type will make more sense for your website. If your page is focused on a single video, it probably makes sense to use the type “video”. If it’s a general website with no specific vertical, you would probably just want to use the type “website”.

Similar to the others, this is unique for each page. So if your homepage is "website,” you could always have another page of type “video”.

So if I were to create an open graph type for my website, it might look like the following on my homepage:

<!-- colbyfayock.com -->
<meta property=“og:type” content=“profile” />

When navigating to a blog post, it would look like:

<!-- https://www.colbyfayock.com/2020/03/anyone-can-map-inspiration-and-an-introduction-to-the-world-of-mapping/ -->
<meta property=“og:type” content=“article” />

You can find the most common open graph website types on the open graph webpage: https://ogp.me/#types

Some other open graph tags that are worth adding

Though you’ll generally be okay with the basics, here are a few more that would be worth adding:

• og:description: A description of your page. Similarly to og:title, this may be the same as your website’s <meta type=“description”> tag, unless you’d like to present it differently.
• og:locale: If you want to localize your tags, it would probably make sense to include locale. The format is language_TERRITORY, where the default is en_US.
• og:site_name: The name of the overall website your content is on. If you're on a blog post page, you might have a title using that blog post’s title, where the site_name would be the name of your blog.
• og:video: Have a video that supports your content? Here’s a chance to include it. Add a link to your video using this tag.

These tags will be added in the same pattern as before:

<meta property=“[NAME]” content=“[VALUE]” />

Twitter and other social media networks using open graph

Most of the social networks adhere to the basics of open graph standards, but a few of them also include their own extension to help customize the look and feel within their ecosystem.

Twitter for instance, allows you to specify twitter:card, which is the type of “card” you can use when they show your website. At this time, their card types include:

• summary
• summary_large_image
• app
• player

This will help you choose how your links are used in their feed. If you choose summary_large_image for instance, Twitter will show your links with big high resolution images as long as you’re providing it in the in the og:image tag.

Here are some quick references to the documentation of how to use open graph tags with some of the social media sites:

• Twitter: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/optimize-with-cards/guides/getting-started
• Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/
• Pinterest: https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/rich-pins/overview/?
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/46687/making-your-website-shareable-on-linkedin?lang=en

Images in open graph

While adding your image as og:image should often be enough, sometimes it can be challenging to get your image to show up correctly. If you seem to be running into trouble, the open graph standard includes a few image tags such as og:image:url vs og:image:secure_url as well as the og:image:width and og:image:height.

Try to make sure you’re following all of the notes and examples in the open graph documentation. Additionally, some of the social networks have image requirements. Twitter for instance requires a ratio of 2:1 with a minimum size of 300x157 and a maximum size of 4096x4096 that’s under 5MB and of JPG, PNG, WEBP or GIF format.

If you’re stuck, test your tags using the social media network’s tools to see if you can find the issue.

Testing your open graph tags

Luckily, our favorite social networks also provide tools to help us debug our tags. Once you make sure that your tags are actually showing up in the source code of your website, you’ll be able to preview how your website will look in the feed.

• Twitter: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
• Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
• Pinterest: https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/url-debugger/

Digging further into open graph tags

While most of these should cover a basic website, there are a few more tags that might help you and your business’s discoverability throughout social networks.

If you’re interested in diving in more, the documentation does a great job at providing a list of all of the available tags for you to use.

https://ogp.me/

Can I get an example?

If you’re simply looking for an example to get started, here’s what you should end up with when setting up your tags for a blog post:

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Colby Fayock" />
<meta property=“og:title” content=“Anyone Can Map! Inspiration and an introduction to the world of mapping - Colby Fayock" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Chef Gusteau was a visionary who created food experiences for the world to enjoy. How can we take his lessons and apply them to the world of…" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.colbyfayock.com/2020/03/anyone-can-map-inspiration-and-an-introduction-to-the-world-of-mapping/" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.colbyfayock.com" />
<meta property="article:section" content="Coding" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Coding" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://res.cloudinary.com/fay/image/upload/w_1280,h_640,c_fill,q_auto,f_auto/w_860,c_fit,co_rgb:232129,g_west,x_80,y_-60,l_text:Source%20Sans%20Pro_70_line_spacing_-10_semibold:Anyone%20Can%20Map!%20Inspiration%20and%20an%20introduction%20to%20the%20world%20of%20mapping/blog-social-card-1.1" />
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Looking for other ways to optimize and analyze your content?

• How to Add a Social Media Image to Your Github Project Repository
• How to Make Sense of Google Analytics and the Traffic to Your Website
• How to set up and track YouTube Channel performance with Google Analytics

• Why is SEO important?
• How is SEO important to YouTube?
• And what is Google Analytics?
• How do I connect my channel?
• What will I be able to see?
• What won’t I be able to see?
• What else can I do with YouTube and Google Analytics?

Why is SEO important?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of writing and organizing content in a way that search engines like Google can crawl and ultimately understand what your website or YouTube channel is about.

Using this information, Google and others make decisions with their algorithms to determine which content is of higher quality, more relevant, and more likely to answer the question you’re looking for on their search engine in the first place. With that information, the search engines rank this content and display their results ordered by those rankings.

How is SEO important to YouTube?

Just like any other website, YouTube gets crawled by Google and other search engines. Additionally, YouTube has its own internal search that will take these same things into consideration when deciding how to display results on a YouTube search.

Searching for "code" channels on YouTube

This means, depending on how well you create your descriptions, manage your keywords, or name your videos, it could impact how well your videos rank in the results. And this can impact how many views your videos get.

This also applies to your channel. You have opportunities to experiment with effectiveness through the content you feature, your channel description, and the name of your channel.

And what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool from Google that will allow you to gain better insights into your traffic. I previously wrote about what is Google Analytics and how you can make sense of it which provides a more in depth view. So if you want to learn a little more before diving in, I highly recommend starting there.

How do I connect my channel?

Setting up a new tracking code

To start, we’ll need a tracking code from Google Analytics. Google has some great up to date resources on how to do this, so I'm not going to try to re-explain here:

• Setting up a new property
• Getting your Tracking ID

Though some say you can use your website’s property and create a filtered View, I recommend starting with a separate property. That way you don’t have to worry about any data crossover or setting up complicated filters.

Tracking ID in Google Analytics

Your tracking ID will be in the following format: UA-######-#. Once you have that, we're ready to go.

Adding your tracking code to YouTube

There are a few steps we have to navigate through to find where we can set up our Google Analytics account. If you want to skip to the right place, you can visit youtube.com/advanced_settings.

To take the long route, which will also help you get a little more familiar with your YouTube account, first head over to the Settings section from within your YouTube Studio page.

Finding Settings on your YouTube Studio dashboard

Once selected, find the Advanced channel settings link by visiting Channel, Advanced Settings, and then scrolling down to the bottom.

Advanced channel settings on YouTube

Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page again, find the Google Analytics property tracking ID field, enter the tracking ID you created, and hit save.

Setting the Google Analytics property tracking ID for your YouTube channel

Sit back and wait

Google Analytics will only show your website traffic from the point it was set up and through the future. Unfortunately we can’t check out that weekend your video first went viral if you didn’t have Google Analytics set up then, but at least we’re prepared for the next time!

Joey and Chandler reclining their chairs

That said, now's the time to continue working hard on your channel since you have the ability to track how that hard work is paying off as people visit your channel.

Optional: Setting up Site Search

Setting up Google Analytic’s Site Search feature gives us an easy way to separate out search usage to make it easier to gain insight into how people are searching our channel.

To enable Site Search, we want to go to the Admin section of our Google Analytics property and then navigate over to View Settings. Once there, under the Site Search settings at the bottom, first click the button to toggle on Site search Tracking, then type “query” into the Query parameter input.

Site search Tracking in Google Analytics

Optionally, though recommended, you can select to strip query parameters out of your URL. This means that in your main content view, you will see all traffic as /search instead of many instances of /search?query=[keyword], which can be more cumbersome to analyze.

Note: before you set this up, it’s generally recommended to have more than one view for your property. I would recommend having at least 2 views, a Raw Data view and Main view. You would only apply the Site Search feature to your Main view. This will help to make sure you can always see the unfiltered Raw Data view if you want.

What will I be able to see?

How many people visited my channel?

The first thing we get immediately with our new data when we open up our Google Analytics property is how many people visited our site.

Google Analytics Home

The default here is in the past 7 days, but you can change the time range in the bottom left corner of the panel.

What this also provides is a quick insight into how the number of people has changed since the previous period (the 7 days before in this example). As we can see here, the number of people this week has increased by 13.9% which is awesome news for freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel, proving whatever they did is working.

How are people finding our channel?

So how do we figure out if the strategies we’re using (like SEO) to get people to our channel are effective? By analyzing our organic search traffic.

By navigating to the Source/Medium report by visiting Acquisition, All Traffic, then Source/Medium, we can see what sources are providing our YouTube channel the most traffic.

Source/Medium report in Google Analytics

By clicking in to google / organic, we can also see how this has changed over time.

Organic Google traffic report in Google Analytics

While analyzing a single week isn’t the most effective, being able to tell how your organic traffic has changed over multiple weeks will be able to tell you if your strategy is working.

What websites and pages are people coming from?

Navigating to the Referrals report by going to Acquisition, All Traffic, and then Referrals, we can see that most of the referral traffic for the freeCodeCamp YouTube is from freeCodeCamp.org itself.

Referral traffic showing freecodecamp.org as highest referrer in Google Analytics

But say we want to see what pages those referrals are coming from. We can find this out by clicking on the freecodecamp.org link in the view above where we can see a full breakdown of which pages are giving the channel the most traffic.

freecodecamp.org referral pages on Google Analytics

What are people searching for on my channel?

After setting up Site Search on your Google Analytics account, you’ll be able to get better insight into how people are actually searching your site.

Search Terms report in Google Analytics

Here we can see what keywords people want to see the most, meaning we can tailor our content and future videos to those keywords, making our channel more effective.

More insights

By default, you’ll get a lot of other cool insights from Google Analytics that are baked in like where your visitors are physically located and whether they’re visiting on a desktop or mobile device.

To learn more about what you can see, check out my article on making sense of Google Analytics.

What won’t I be able to see?

While the information you’ll discover through Google Analytics is important, it’s not all inclusive. There are many points you’ll need to dive into YouTube’s own Analytics tool to see.

Analytics dashboard in YouTube Studio

Video analytics

Video states and actions aren’t going to be visible in Google Analytics, which includes things like Play, Pause, and time watched.

However, by using the Engagement tab in the YouTube Studio Analytics section, we can see how long people are watching our videos and a graph of the Audience retention. This will help us determine how the content of our videos is performing.

Subscribers

You’re not going to be able to gain insights into how the visitors on your channel are subscribing.

The good news is you can find this by visiting the the Analytics section in your YouTube Studio page, then clicking the Audience tab at the top.

Dig in to YouTube Studio Analytics

There’s a whole lot you can find out if you dig around YouTube Studio Analytics. Take the time to poke around both Analytics report solutions and learn what information is most useful to providing an impactful experience for your channel.

What else can I do with YouTube and Google Analytics?

Track links from YouTube to your website

If you have a website outside of your YouTube channel and have Google Analytics set up on it, you can build custom URLs that will allow you to see your YouTube traffic as a campaign. This is useful not only for YouTube, but any other source you’re directing traffic to your website from.

Building campaign URLs Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics provides this capability using URL parameters attached to the links. You can learn more about the setup and what you need to do with Google’s Analytics Help site.

It should also be noted that you don’t really need to set up your YouTube channel with Google Analytics to make use of this feature.

Track how videos are watched when embedded on your website

YouTube provides an API that developers can use to write custom JavaScript and track usage of embedded videos on a given website.

Using this, we can send custom events based on time references or video actions (like play and pause) to get a better idea of how the videos on our site are being used.

To be clear – this is only for videos embedded on your website and will probably track usage with your website's Google Analytics property unless you configure it otherwise.

Check out YouTube iFrame Player API for more info.

Pretty much anything Google Analytics provides by default

There’s a whole lot you can do with Google Analytics, whether it’s getting better visibility into where people are coming from or where they’re physically located. And by connecting your YouTube channel you automatically get those insights.

The more resources, the more insight you can gain

Though there are benefits to both YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics, having more information will ultimately help you make better judgement calls about how you manage your channel and content. Use these tools to help launch yourself to inevitable YouTube stardom!

Want to skip ahead of the “what” and “why”? Jump to the “how”!

Impact of images in social media

Any social media feed is a flurry of content that can be difficult to completely digest. As you swipe or scroll through the feeds, you’ll be met with some text-based content and a ton of media.

Twitter feeds with media on TweetDeck

And this is for a good reason! As you scan the example above, what stands out? Not the Dust Particle retweet from CodePen on the left, but the AWS in the middle, dog nose in the top left, and Al Pacino in the top right among the other large media posts.

Images, gifs, and videos are a good way to provide eye-catching content. As a bonus, they typically take up much more space in the feed, making it even more likely you’ll get a chance to see it.

The bare minimum on Github

When sharing your Github projects to social media, the default option is pretty bland. Take this tweet as an example:

Github gives us a simple social media card that’s comprised of our Github avatar, the path of our project, and the short description from the top of the page.

Now it’s great they even show a card to begin with and to be fair, what would they show? But this tweet is going to get skipped pretty easily in people’s feeds between big, shiny images.

Github social media images

Luckily, Github provides us with a nice and easy way to add an image to each repo that can help the content we share work for itself a little more.

With a little creative work, we can upload an image that will that will take advantage of the space on people’s feeds and get your work the attention it deserves.

Example of a social image using Canva

Before we dive in, it should be noted that you must have the appropriate access to be able to modify the settings of the repository in order to change the image. If you created the repo, chances are you have this access.

Finding or creating an image

Before we upload an image, we need an image in the first place. You can go one of two routes: finding an image or creating a new one.

If you want to go the simple route, you can look around for free to use images that are pretty easy to find on the web. A favorite of mine is Unsplash, as you’ll typically find high quality images, but there are a ton of others you can find with a simple search. However, adding photos is usually better served for blog posts and content-based posts.

The better route is to create your own. The advantage of creating an image is you can customize it with large text to catch some extra attention in the feed.

There are a ton of free tools that are available that allow you to create an image starting with a social media specific template, so you don’t need to spend the money on Photoshop to get there.

The only requirement for your image is that its size must be at least 640×320px. If possible, strive for at least 1280×640px to make sure the image is showing at a high resolution in feeds.

Adding an image to your Github repo

Once we have our image, we’re just left with adding the image to our repo, which is arguably the simpler part.

First, navigate to the Settings of your Repo using the tab navigation towards the top of the page. As a reminder, you need to be able to modify the settings to change the image.

Github Settings page

Next, scroll down to the Social Preview section, where if you don't currently have an image set, you’ll find a big empty rectangle with an edit button in the bottom left corner.

Upload social image on Github

Click the Edit button, select Upload an image, then find your image on your computer and select the file.

Once selected, your image file will be uploaded to Github and set as your social image!

Social preview on Github

Previewing your new image

When you’re done uploading your image, you can make your way to your favorite social platform and give it a try. Posting to Twitter for example will now show a nice big image instead of your small Github avatar!

As you can see, this tweet is maximizing the space available and getting the point across about what the project is about.

A few tips when creating images

Large, simple text

It can be easy to get caught up in over-designing a graphic or not paying enough attention to the font size. Make sure you use big letters with a font that’s easy to read, so when someone scrolls past your post, they can understand it and not just skip it.

Add a logo

Do you have a logo for your project? Or is it a plugin for a specific tool? Try adding a logo to immediately give context about what the project is about!

Maximize resolution

No one likes looking at poor quality images. Take advantage of all of those precious pixels and upload an image that will translate to high quality in a feed. Github particularly recommends an image size of at least 1280×640px.

Have any other tricks to maximize sharing on social?

Share your favorite tips with me on Twitter!

Between the three of them, the co-founders of Orbit have decades of experience in engineering and developer relations, building products at companies such as Accenture, Algolia, Apple and Keen.io. After launching Orbit, they spent the last year talking with people in the DevRel space about proving the value of DevRel.

January is a common time for executives to ask what kind of investments they should make in developer relations including what hires to make, and what the business case is.

After Orbit joined Heavybit last month, I sat down with Josh, Patrick, and Dustin to talk about their approach to DevRel, from partnerships and promotions to outsourcing and metrics.

Table of Contents

• What are the biggest missteps companies make when it comes to DevRel?
• What parts of DevRel should companies outsource?
• How do you leverage partnerships?
• How can DevRel partner with business development?
• How do you balance creation vs promotion?
• Who in DevRel would you like to call out?

Q: What are the biggest missteps companies make when it comes to DevRel?

One big mistake is trying to hire a developer advocate before the company has learned to do at least a little DevRel on their own. In the consulting world, companies would come to us and say "we’re ready to hire, we just need help writing a job description and sourcing candidates." At that point, sometimes these companies had not given a talk or created developer-facing content.

By contrast, at some companies, every engineer is doing some aspect of DevRel from the time the company starts, like giving talks and contributing to projects. If a company tries to hire a DevRel-specific role but doesn’t have experience in that area, it’s going to be difficult for them to be successful.

Companies and teams have to define their internal expectations for DevRel. It’s common to read a job description for DevRel that isn't focused -- it could span dozens of key activities! If a company has done DevRel themselves, they typically surface a more focused job description. For example, do they see this role on the road giving talks, or being an internal advocate? We want to help companies avoid writing job descriptions that are “be all the things.”

Q: What parts of DevRel should companies keep in-house, versus outsourcing?

It depends on which parts of the DevRel process you need help with.

On one hand, your DevRel person who has the touch points with the community -- that person should live and breathe inside your organization and embodies the organization's culture. If a company has contracted with an outside firm, you may not get the same experience talking to them, versus talking with employees embedded in the culture of the company.

If your advocate echoes your values, it leads to a better developer experience. That’s a risk when making a contract hire, especially on the community side. I’ve seen contractors do social media for a company’s developer community and it all goes wrong — it’s mind blowing why companies do this with little training and oversight.

However, if you’re working solely on content, tutorials, etc, that can be a great place for outside help, since there will be other people in the organization that are reviewing the content to make sure it falls in line with the company's positioning and values.

We consulted for the past year so we have some bias here, but using outside companies to generate strategic, third-party content can give you a lot of leverage. They can lean on your internal teams to amplify the content and bring the messages to market. We’ve done this a number of times with different companies -- it makes developer advocates inside the company feel like superheroes because they have a lot of great content that they can bring out and share with the community.

Q: How can we in developer relations leverage internal partnerships to increase our reach and effectiveness?

We think partnerships can be one of the most impactful parts of a successful DevRel strategy. A single advocate or DevRel team serves as a force multiplier across the entire company. The internal impacts of a team that’s working well are enormous when multiplied across the entire company.

We can give tons of examples, but to focus on a few: in marketing, DevRel can help keep the brand voice true to the developer personality. In return, marketing helps DevRel be more data driven, driving value in both directions.

In larger companies, there is an opportunity to bring the voice of the developer into internal conversations. You can imagine bringing stories from the field into the walls of the building and giving the company a few into how developers interact with your product.

Historically there has been somewhat of a mismatch between teams like sales and marketing and community teams like DevRel. Often this is based on a mismatch in funnels.

DevRel can evangelize alternate models of measuring impact of community instead of the standard model of pushing people into a funnel and measuring purchasing events. The Orbit model allows you to rewire the way companies think about community, not just a standard marketing funnel, but allowing you to create metrics around your community efforts.

We also see DevRel and Sales working well together — historically, this isn’t always the case! We've seen that they can be very collaborative and complementary when there is clear communication.

In large organizations it's rad to see individual developers participating in the community -- if a company's developers are contributing to your project, that’s a strong signal that the company may be interested in a commercial relationship.

From a sales perspective, you probably don't want an SDR emailing those developers, but the SDR would love to have feedback about that developer’s activity that they could reference when calling the developer’s manager. Of course, that requires data and tooling on the back-end to surface that information, and that’s something we see a lot of companies moving towards in 2020.

We actually wrote a whole series for Heavybit covering different tactics for internal collaboration.

Q: How about business development -- where are the opportunities for developer relations teams to partner there?

Agency partnerships come to mind pretty quickly. For companies with a developer-focused platform, part of the BizDev model is to partner with agencies who can build the platform into products for clients. Algolia had relationships with agencies implementing all the different ecommerce and CMS platforms.

Creating formal partnerships with these companies can be useful for BizDev but can also help your DevRel program by encouraging the agency developers to be involved in the technology ecosystem.

DevRel can also partner with complementary companies and projects. This can keep things fresh and make sure you’re not talking too much about yourself and your products -- you're bringing some fresh voices into the conversation.

Q: Where do you draw the line on creating new assets, such as content and talks, and promoting those assets? Should 100% of your DevRel budget go to creation, 100% to publicity, or somewhere in between?

Looking at DevRel as a whole, generally we think that more re-use would be smart. Writing a new presentation each time you give a talk is very expensive in terms of effort and mental energy.

Many developer advocates are hesitant to re-use material, but they shouldn’t be -- there are millions of developers out there who haven’t seen your presentation before. If stand-up comedians can re-use the same jokes for years, you shouldn’t have to worry about giving the same talk twice in the same city.

One trick I have: give talks to engineers inside the company, and then let the engineers give that talk elsewhere. Make your assets and presentations so that others can re-use the deck and script. That’s a nice way to get engagement in the DevRel effort from others in the organization — three months later, someone is speaking on stage, maybe for the first time.

Often there are engineers inside your company who want to get started getting talks, and as developer advocates who do this multiple times per week, we can facilitate these engineers and also cover more territory. (There are a lot of events I want to speak at, but I can’t be in two places at the same time.)

Q: Is there anybody out there in DevRel who is doing an amazing job, that you’d like to highlight?

• Doron Sherman, VP DevRel at Cloudinary has a great DevRel program
• Stefan Judis at Twilio for being data-driven, he’s got a great approach and dashboard for his content that is pretty impressive
• Tim Berglund and Ale Murray, Confluent team

Thanks to Josh Dzielak, Patrick Woods, and Dustin Larimer for chatting with me about their DevRel experience.

Next Steps:

• Follow Orbit on Twitter
• Check out (literally, you can check it out) the Orbit Model GitHub repo
• Catch up with Orbit's DevRel Blog.