DEV Community: Dmitriy

SEO for Developers: 5 strategies to get your first 100 backlinks

Dmitriy — Mon, 23 May 2022 10:23:26 +0000

Developers most often don't know(don't like) how to do marketing.

So you can just focus on SEO and keep building features.

But to rank lush content, you need backlinks.

So take these 5 tactics and build your first 100 backlinks in 3 months.

1. Communities

Just ask for the link exchange. You'll be surprised how many people want to do it. But be sure to use relevant to your niche communities and place their links back.

2. HARO

It's a service that connects journalists with sources, including BI, NYTimes, and USA Today.

After signing up, you'll get an email 3 times a day with new requests. The majority of them will be not relevant to you, but there is one simple hack you can use.

Create a Gmail filter with [HERO] in a subject and keywords you what to monitor in a Has the words field.

Then look for queries that likely look for multiple experts for the topic and respond to them.

helpareporter.com

3. Guest posting

Guest posting is when you create content to be posted on another website.
Generally picking, that post comes with attribution and a link back to your site.
Find sites in your niche and pitch them with your expertise.

4. Podcast interview

It will take just an hour of your time to get a backlink in this way, but also being interviewed on a podcast will place you as an expert in front of someone else's audience.

5. Email outreach for your best content

This strategy works for the unique content that people in your niche can be interested in.

You can use the same sites you find for the guests posting and ask them to link to you.

But be sure to offer something unique.

TL;DR

Communities
HERO
Guest posting
Podcast interview
Email outreach for your best content

P.S.
if you looking for a way to Build and scale your blog FAST check out marketingnomore.com

We write blog articles that rank on Google.

8 things I've learned while building a Micro SaaS in 8 days

Dmitriy — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:19:11 +0000

1. Don't overcomplicate

I know it's obvious, but a lot of founders do this mistake. Before even starting development make a backlog of all of the features you want to include.

Then reduce it to get the minimal salable version.

And then start development.

2. Use as many no-code solutions as possible

This can save a ton of time and money.

You don't need a fully automated rocket ship at the start.
A boat with oars can do the job.

You can scale it later.

3. Think about the next steps

When I tried to build my first startup, my mistake was to not think about what will be after the launch.

I thought users will magically appear and pay me.

Build a plan with direct steps of what you can do to make 1, 10, and 100 sales.

4. Start marketing ASAP

Even before you start development.

In case you are playing long-term (you should) start doing content marketing.

Don't know how? Find a person who can do it for you. It's worth it.

5. Plan your budget

You can't say how fast you'll make money so it's better to understand how much you can spend until you start earning.

6. Plan your exit

It's a good technique to set clear goals.

Let's say you want to scale to $50k ARR and then sell it.

Now you have a clear goal and can build a plan based on this goal.

7. Set deadlines

Very sobering tactic. Set short and achievable goals in short periods.

It helps to stay involved and rejoice in small victories.

8 days in my case was very dense.

8. Build in public

It's just fun. As a bonus, you can find your audience.

If not it will help you not to quit and reach your deadlines.

Public promises are hard to keep, but it's easy to get along with yourself.

P.S.
I'm writing PROOFS — a newsletter about Marketing for Developers. Sharing simple steps you can follow to build your product. Join here.

I quit a software development after 11 years

Dmitriy — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 13:22:20 +0000

It's not my first try, but final.

Backstory

I started my career back in 2011.
At that time I was in college, learning Visual Basic and dreaming about my own skin for Winamp. Soon I realized that Basic is dying, and the son of my mother's friend told me about PHP and HTML. I was so excited! Right next day I bought 2 books: Building web apps with PHP and MySQL, and Learning jQuery. They were boring! If PHP helps me a bit(I build a blog and a CMS), Learning jQuery I opened 2 or 3 times. The whole book was a copy of official documentation written in a storytelling format.
Then I spend the whole summer studying JavaScript and WordPress. At that time I'm not thinking about money. It was so fun building things and money after all was a nice bonus.
Now, this passion is gone. But first things first.

These eleven years were a journey!

I worked in startups, grew up along with Angular and React, made friends, and travel the world. And the most important - enjoyed writing code! My career grew from writing HTML and CSS to leading an awesome team of 20 engineers.
And all this time I tried to build startups. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes(mostly) not. The main reason for failure was marketing. I didn't know what to do after the launch. And instead of thinking about marketing, I worked on new fancy features. Features that definitely will make the product viral, and magically will blow up. Always I was busy, always have job to do and putting off launch day.

Money game

Over time all this turned into the money game. I start thinking more about making more, and not enjoying the process. I have a chance to move to Silicon Valley to work 60–70 hours per week and make $400k a year. But I still have hope of building my own business and reject an offer.

I double down on my new startup, spend it all my time and after 9 months I failed again. It transforms twice and became an HR tool that was almost impossible to sell. But this time I did much better: thought about marketing, did user research, did around 40 sales calls and 50 demos. But I've failed. The situation could still be saved: spent 2–3 months adding new features from potential users' requests, but I was burned out and decided to take a break.

Co-founder

After a couple of months, a friend of mine told me that his mate looking for a tech co-founder. He was a designer, recently sold his web studio, and wants to build a SaaS business in a niche similar to my previous project. It was a crash!

We partner up and start working on it. I've reused a lot of my previous code, which speeds up us a lot, but still, it comes us with a beta version only after 5 months of development. After getting some feedback from early-stage users we build a new backlog and start looking for the seed round.

And that war in Ukraine broke everything again. I was born in Ukraine but move to Austria 2 years ago, but my co-founder lives in Kyiv. Hopes to get a seed round disappeared, and my co-founder decided to put the project on pause for an indefinite time. Fail. Again.

A new addiction

Over time I lost that enjoyment and fun of writing code, but still, I love building products. And a month ago I comes up with a new idea - a marketing agency for SaaS products. And my most scary nightmare turned into a new obsession. I did almost all the marketing mistakes that it is possible to make as a Founder, so why not help others to avoid them? I put a deadline - launch it in 2 weeks. I already miss it by 2 days, because of the payment system approval. But still, it's my fastest launch, mostly because it requires only HTML and CSS. Back to basics.

And yes - now I'm quite a software development game! And I'm happy. I still building and doing things that I enjoy.

Secure Statement Converter — my next journey, and I hope, I'll succeed in it.

Smart newsletter for Frontend developers

Dmitriy — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 22:06:35 +0000

I’m Dmitry and I’m a founder of SparkySpot, a new platform working tirelessly to help peoples in IT find a new job hassle-free.

I also a frontend developer with 10 years of experience and I know how rapidly the industry is growing, how often do technologies change and how difficult it is to find time to learn something new that does not fit into your main development stack.

And as a part of SparkySpot, I've created a smart weekly newsletter that helps stay up to date with all parts of the front-end without spending a lot of time.

Here how it works. Once a week you got an email that covers one specific topic or technology and let you dive into it with 5 steps:

About and general information
Where can I use
Dive into
Useful links and resources
Getting started with the practical task

And over the next week, you have time to go throw these steps which are cover all necessary information, contain links for useful articles, libraries, and examples and let you start with the practical task.

Here is upcoming topics:

Static site generators
CSS Architecture
Front-end performance
PWA
Testing JavaScript
Server-Side Rendering(SSR)
Mobile applications
Web Security for Frontend
GraphQL
Firebase

You can subscribe here https://sparkyspot.com/week-of-code

And let me know if you want to cover any topic or technology and I'll add it to the list.