Blog Header
← Back to Blog
Nevo David

How to make sure developers click on your content

August 19, 2023

Nevo David

We see thousands of posts/ads/content every day.
Our brains already filter out (subconsciously) what to look at and what to skip.

Even if you write the best article in the world, if people don’t click on it, engage with it / watch it, it will all go down the drain.

That’s why I usually add a lot of emojis to my DEV articles and try to put an eye-catching cover and title.

Here is the quickest scenario, you open DEV, the article popups on the main feed, and you have 3 seconds to convince developers to click on your article.

I have read Hook Point, listened to MrBeast marketing and Julius Dein's marketing strategy, which made me switch my current way of writing hooks.

I created the hook of “[emoji] Build X with Y [emoji]” and ran with it for an entire year. It was super successful.

But then people started to copy me / I taught people how to write it.

And once everybody does it, it again looks boring.

It sounds a bit harsh, but you must intrigue people to click on your content, even if it does not provide much value.

Here is the thing I would look for:

  • A title that makes you stop and read 🔥 - must contain emojis, a reward, and what people can achieve for this - according to “Hook Point,” most algorithms don’t like the storytelling anymore. Remember you saw this Tasty video on Facebook before people cooked something, and in the end, you saw the final product? Now you will see that people first see the final product, and then the video start.
    Same thing with movies. There is a “teaser” before the “trailer.”

  • The cover image 🎇 - this is one of the MOST critical stuff, and a good picture will make people click here is the thing - most people on DEV are not putting too much effort into it. You can leverage that. I make my pictures with Midjourney, which looks ten times better. If you can, buy a subscription.

Here is my suggestion: When you write your title, think if you have seen something like it before - if the answer is yes, try to change it.

The best way to come up with ideas is to look at different websites for trending articles.

Also, learn more about blogging for developers

The bigger you are, the harder it is to trend on GitHub (Especially if you are not an LLM project)

A few days ago, I thought, damn, it’s so hard for Novu to trend on GitHub lately.

So I had an idea, let’s take everything we do weekly and make it 3x stronger. So we have prepared quite a launch, and here is what we have done:

  1. On Monday, We added a DEV post, and we tried this time to make it even more attractive by using a strong cover and title with Mid-Journey (tutorial on the next newsletter)

  1. On Wednesday, We posted Novu again on /r/selfhosted with the new version we released.

  1. We used 3!! Influencers! (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

And after all that? You guessed it!

Do you need help?

If you are building something and are serious about it, feel free to schedule a call with me here (it’s free). I might give you some “aha!” moments. Who knows 🙇🏻‍♂️

If you love this newsletter, please help me out - send it to a friend and convince them to register - it helps me to create more content ❤️

See you next week!