How to use CTA in open-source articles

I just finished with Novu offsite in Portugal. It was an intensive week of thinking and team collaboration.

Today I would like to talk about the call to action (CTA) and the importance of it.

As many of you know, I am a big supporter of growth articles.
Hold up. What are growth articles?

For us in Novu, one of our most prominent strategies was to become trending on GitHub - I can elaborate on it a lot, but the bottom line - is when you appear on GitHub's main trending feed, you get a lot of eyes from great early adopters that can try out your product.

Every time we got trending on GitHub, we tripled the number of registrations that week.

For that, we mainly used growth articles.

You see when you publish an article on your website, you need to wait for SEO to kick in, but for a library that is barely a few months in the market with a shallow SEO score, we have decided that one of the best ways to it is to post our articles on platforms that can gain immediate traction.

For developers, those platforms are (from best to low): DEV.to, Hashnode, Medium, and Hackernoon.

We have played with the articles a lot and cracked a way to become trending and featured on every one of them weekly!

But the main question was:
What do we put in our call to action?

I had the chance to try multiple calls to action, from playing with memes to different text and different placements.

It doesn't matter if your article gets trended if your call-to-action is not good. The article will trend, but you will get no benefit from that.

I had articles passing 60k views per month, not helping a lot.

We wanted to get more stars on GitHub to become trending.

SO THIS IS WHAT WORKED FOR US.... drum rolls 🪈🪘

Cats. Really but not really.

My best call to action is empathy. I ask for stars. But not to "Help me to reach 1k stars", not "Can you give us a star." but more like: "Can you please help me out? I could really use your help." and of course, a meme of a cat saying help - specifically cat, worked better than the others. 😻

I have a Twitter space on how I craft and bring traffic to my articles. This Wednesday, you are invited to join me here (Add a reminder from the link):

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1RDGlaQyAQDJL?s=20

Oh yes, and you are probably asking yourself what a good call-to-action does.

It gets many more people to our link with the call to action we ask for. Simple.

....till next time (next week),

Nevo.