Nimrod Kramer for daily.dev

Posted on Jul 28, 2020 • Edited on Aug 5, 2020 • Originally published at daily.dev

How to write viral stories for developers

#career #productivity #startup

We have recently announced that we will start accepting stories written by the community for the daily.dev blog 🎉 That's an excellent opportunity to share our insights on writing effectively for software developers.

In case you've missed it, here is how to submit a story to daily.dev?

Pick an idea you're passionate about ⚡️

Developers appreciate the knowledge and hard-working people. Therefore it makes sense that the first place you should go to when looking for an idea to write about it your expertise. If you have experience in a specific technology, framework, methodology, or anything else, it is a fantastic way for a start.

Nonetheless, here are some tools to help you get inspired:

Blog Ideas Generator by Hubspot. Start by writing down some keywords that you feel will be the main subject for your blog post, and their engine will generate useful ideas for you.

BlogAbout by Impact. That's another powerful tool to find inspiration for a new blog post. It works similarly to the one provided by Hubspot. Many people love this tool, including us at daily.dev

Write clearly and with a human touch 💎

Going straight to the point, for those of you who want to go pro about writing for developers, we recommend reading the book "Writing for Software Developers" by Philip Kiely. Read it and thank us later—tons of great insights and interviews with highly experienced people in this field.

In case you're more into indie writing in your free time, there are tons of examples and best practices out there worthy of your time. The most important point to remember is that people are busy! So make sure that your post is:

Easy to read and understand
Brings something new to the table
Short as possible. If it's too long, try to split it into multiple followup posts

Improve the readability of your story 🤓

Once you're done writing and formatting your draft, you need to improve its readability. You can try any of these tools to analyze your story:

Grammarly. Currently, the market leader for helping people write properly and correctly. It will help you compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing using and AI-powered writing assistant.

Pros: works on every platform. Intuitive to use.
Cons: their premium plan is a bit expensive, and the free plan is not enough, in our opinion.

Hemingway. Works on the same concept. It's a text editor that would help you write better. Some people prefer it over Grammarly as it is straightforward and offers many more free features that Grammarly is charging you for.

Pros: the free plan is handy
Cons: a bit old-fashioned. The recommendation engine is a bit weak

Optimize your story's headline 👀

The headline is an essential part of the story. Spend time refining it. It would be best if you strived to make the headline of your story attractive. Try to make the reader curious to read more, but don't fall into the "clickbait" category. That's nasty, and developers hate it for a reason.

Like anything that has to do with writing, adding a tiny bit of magic can make the difference. Here are some tools that can help you optimize your story's headline:

Headline Analyzer. This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score based on proprietary analysis technology developed by the Advanced Marketing Institute.

Co-Schedule. It is a powerful tool that will help you write headlines that drive traffic, shares, and search results. Once you submit the headline, it will analyze its strength based on their formula.