• 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!

Why is writing important in the first place?

Everyone will develop their own reasons for why writing is important to them, but there are aspects of writing that can help us all.

Writing is a way to teach both others and yourself. While it may be obvious that writing out a tech guide is helping to teach an audience, you're also reinforcing your own learning. Documenting your experiences both provides a way to dig deep into what you've learned and also gives you a way to reference it in the future.

While writing comes easier to some than others, it doesn't have to be scary! There's always someone that can learn from your perspective whether you're new or experienced on a topic.

And the best part about writing is you can do it for yourself. If you want to write to help yourself grow, you can do so privately and never share it with the public! But when making that decision, weigh the benefits, as there is some merit to learning in public.

So now that you're convinced, what can you do to make your writing more effective?

Keep your content organized with headlines

Getting someone to read your content is already hard enough, but when you have a sea of text, it just makes digging in more intimidating.

Naturally when reading, having breaking points helps let your brain keep thoughts organized and understand the hierarchy of the page. By using headlines, we can effectively break our thoughts into chunks of content that can help others more easily follow along.

React's use of headings on their documentation website

An easy way to approach this is to think about the outline of your page before you dig in. When writing this article, I thought about what I wanted to talk about and in what order I thought it made the most sense.

While maybe some people might have understood the article regardless of the organization, it makes more sense to explain why it's important before going into how we can be more effective. Having that flow also helps me better express my thoughts as I'm writing the content.

This also helps from an SEO perspective. When you use HTML headers (which is common in most content management systems), you're signaling to Google and the other search giants what your page is about and what's most important.

By effectively using headlines, you're helping not only your readers, but you're helping to send the right signals to the robots indexing your page for search.

Visualizing your thoughts with images

Similar to headers, seeing a wall of text with no visual breakpoints can be hard to consume. Another way we can break up this content and provide more value is to add pictures to go along with our thoughts.

Pictures can be useful for a variety of reasons. For complex concepts, having a diagram can help illustrate thick data that can be hard to understand. Throwing a bunch of numbers in a sentence is easier to create, but providing a graph or chart can help someone actually understand what those numbers mean.

New York Times data visualization of running shoes

Adding examples of a new idea can help contextualize your thoughts. This can serve as a way to demonstrate a use case or to inspire someone with successful implementations.

But sometimes images are a good way to break the tension. Later we'll talk about finding your voice, but this is a way to help shape it. While maybe a funny gif isn't appropriate in a science paper, it can be a good way to get a chuckle in the middle of a technical walkthrough, particularly after getting through a dry, challenging part!

Spongebob bored

Link to other sources for more context and trust

When writing, the last thing most of us probably think about is adding links to other pages. But this can be a valuable tool at your disposal!

From your reader's perspective, linking to other pages is a way to show authority with your writing. Are you making a claim based on facts? Link to those facts! By backing up your claim, you're building trust with your readers that you're doing the research.

Link and chart to show language popularity trends

But you're also helping yourself. If you've been writing for a while, you already have a stock of great content you want to share. Why not link to some of your past work with some internal links?

The first sentence in this article when I was explaining why writing is important was a link to one of my previous articles: Overcoming Your Fear of Writing and How You Can Find Motivation. Rather than rewriting all of the same content, I can highlight a key point and provide a link for the reader to follow if they're interested. I'm both helping give the reader more value and sharing more of my content at the same time.

Providing links to other sources via external links is also helpful. In addition to backing up your claims with your readers, you're also helping build that trust with search engines who can see that you're linking to trusted resources.

And there's also a chance someone from that other website can see you sending over links. If you're sending them traffic and they see value in your work, they might return the favor and send people your way.

Similar to headers, providing both internal and external links are another tool we have to build trust with both our readers and search engines.

Finding your voice

Everyone tends to have their own unique voice when talking to others. And I'm not talking about the sound of your voice, but your style. It's the words you use, how you phrase them, and your experiences that go into those words.

You might even have a few different voices. Sometimes we need to be a little more professional in a school or work setting whereas we can be more relaxed with friends and family. But similar to when you talk to people, everyone has their own voice when writing.

This is something that will develop over time. Some people are lucky and find it early, but the more you write, the more you will develop your own unique style that people will grow to love.

ThinkGeek's historically unique writing voice

And it's something that you don't need to and shouldn't fake. While changing the voice of your writing can be important if you're writing on behalf of someone else, when you're writing from your own point of view, try to be yourself and open up your mind through your writing.

For me it comes from the passion of my work. I love being a developer so my voice naturally comes as I write articles to help others with their own journey. Try to remember why you're writing and it will help you craft your voice with that passion.

A few other thoughts

Here are a few more points that are worth mentioning.

Code snippets

Similar to images, code can be an effective way of demonstrating your point. It also proves as a way to share the code as you're walking through how to create something.

While helpful, be careful not to abuse code snippets. You don't want long blocks of code that extend beyond the page or really even half of the page for that matter. If the code is going to be long, try using something like a gist, git repo, CodeSandbox, or Codepen.

Image quality

Nobody likes looking at poor quality images. When adding a new image, make sure the resolution is high enough that it's clear and not looking fuzzy.

You also don't want to go too far overboard with high resolution imagery, as the bigger the image is, the larger the file size. Try to avoid huge images so your readers don't have to download those big files.

Writing tools

Try to get comfortable with your writing tools. There are a ton of options whether you use something like Bear to write with markdown or if you prefer to write directly in the CMS.

There's also a lot of tools that can help improve the quality of your writing. Hemingway will actually analyze the readability of your writing and help point out where you could improve it.

Effective storytelling

These are just some tools that can help you tell your stories. While we're all writing for our own purposes, you can use these tools to ultimately help boost the great content that you're working hard to create!

What are your tips for good writing?

Share with me on Twitter and start the conversation!