I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
Jennifer, Betsy, and I are programmers. While we are pretty good at bending computers to our whims and helping people and software teams be more effective, we are bad at content and community marketing.
The first part of this year, we did a lot of writing with no clear calls to action. Yet as much as we'd like to believe in the field of dreams, what we learned is that even if we build it, it doesn't mean people will come. About a month ago we sat down, looked at what we were doing and the impact it was having was and made a few changes:
Everything we write should be useful and valuable independent of any further time or attention investment. (It sounds like this piece didn't hit that bar for you)
Focus our writing on the services we like to do and want to do more of (training and coaching on effective technical collaboration techniques, how to to make nuanced, thoughtful trade-offs when designing and implementing features, and "how does one even approach "legacy"/complicated code systems?"
Include a strong call to action.
My guess is we're probably a bit too far towards the strong call to action in this piece, but it's definitely a learning experience for us and we 100% appreciate this feedback!
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
I see a lot of these "advertorials" on Medium, which is one of the reasons I primarily read here and not there. But this is the first one I've seen here.
This site is supposed to be a place where devs can share their experiences with other devs. That's what I'm expecting when I read a post. So when I get to the bottom of a post and realize it's really an ad, I feel deceived.
We went through this whole thing before with deceptive banner ads and the internet decided to label them as ads.
Any chance you'd do something along the same line and prefix your posts with a "sponsored content" notice of some kind? I know that sounds risky but perhaps you'd consider doing it as an experiment? Run an A/B test on it?
Did I just read an ad?
Short answer? Yes. Long answer: Yeeeeessss?
Jennifer, Betsy, and I are programmers. While we are pretty good at bending computers to our whims and helping people and software teams be more effective, we are bad at content and community marketing.
The first part of this year, we did a lot of writing with no clear calls to action. Yet as much as we'd like to believe in the field of dreams, what we learned is that even if we build it, it doesn't mean people will come. About a month ago we sat down, looked at what we were doing and the impact it was having was and made a few changes:
My guess is we're probably a bit too far towards the strong call to action in this piece, but it's definitely a learning experience for us and we 100% appreciate this feedback!
I see a lot of these "advertorials" on Medium, which is one of the reasons I primarily read here and not there. But this is the first one I've seen here.
This site is supposed to be a place where devs can share their experiences with other devs. That's what I'm expecting when I read a post. So when I get to the bottom of a post and realize it's really an ad, I feel deceived.
We went through this whole thing before with deceptive banner ads and the internet decided to label them as ads.
Any chance you'd do something along the same line and prefix your posts with a "sponsored content" notice of some kind? I know that sounds risky but perhaps you'd consider doing it as an experiment? Run an A/B test on it?
Best of luck with your business.
Thanks again for your feedback! I've removed the call to action to sign up for the paid event and replaced it with a link to our newsletter.