Tips for First Time Blogger?

Hello Community,

I just joined DEV.to and am looking for any tips and tricks for posting my first article. If you have any pointers for me, I would be greatly appreciative.

My aim is to post some examples of projects and tasks I've been doing for my job and hobbies. I plan on starting rather small until I get the hang of it.

Looking forward to hearing 👂 from you all.

Comments

[Ben Lovy]

I highly recommend using the Markdown metadata header:

---
title: My Cool Post
published: false
description: A brief description of how useful and cool this post is.
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/deadbeef.png
tags: beginners, opensource, productivity, devops
---

Try to use all four allotted hash tags, and pick from relevant Top 100, they'll boost your visibility more than making up your own.

Also, write for yourself first and the community second. Engagement is kind of tricky to get right, there's a lot of variables, but don't let yourself get discouraged if a high-effort, high-quality post ends up buried. It's not necessarily your content, but in general I think this community does self-select for quality eventually (and, yes, occasionally clickbait).

[Mark Williamson 🇨🇦]

Great tips, thanks!

[Mark Williamson 🇨🇦]

What about a footer (author info)? Does DEV add this automatically or is there a markdown template for this?

[Ben Lovy]

I'm actually not sure how/if the post specifically is associated with you, other than hyperlinks and the URL.

[Milica Maksimovic]

Hey Mark 👋

It's awesome that you want to share your knowledge with people over here.

I wrote a post that might help you with writing your first post - dev.to/m_maksimovic_/tips-for-impr...

Hope it helps!

[Mark Williamson 🇨🇦]

👋🏻hey, thanks for the article. I will give it a read.