Soumyadeep Mandal

Posted on May 4, 2023 • Originally published at linkedin.com

Hashnode Bootcamp Day 2: Personal Branding and Community Engagement

#beginners #writing #developer #bootcamp

Hey there! Did you hear about the Hashnode Bootcamp? It was a three-day event from May 1-3 that helped developers like us improve our writing skills, connect with other professionals, and get ahead in our careers. Even if you're just starting out in the tech world, this Bootcamp was perfect for you!

If you had participated, you would have had so many benefits! You could have made your voice heard in the tech community, met new people to help you in your career, and improved your writing skills. Plus, you would have inspired other developers to do his best too!

The Hashnode Bootcamp was an amazing opportunity to learn new things and be a part of the tech community. You could have gained so much knowledge and made connections that would help you in the future. So, don't miss out on the chance to grow both personally and professionally!

Leveraging Social Media for Monetization by [Nader Dabit] @dabit3

Nader, the director of DevRel at Aave Companies, talks about content creation, personal branding, and social media and how he all fit together. He shares his non-traditional tech background, being a self-taught developer who started coding in 2013 and creating community events in 2014. He started sharing all the things he learned, which led him to write his first blog post in 2015 that received over a million readers, inspiring him to continue creating content. He also started doing conferences in 2016 and started a training company in 2017 called React Native Training, which helped him secure an opportunity to work at AWS for three years before moving into the blockchain space for the last two years.

Personal Branding

Nader talks about the importance of personal branding and how people's non-presence (when he's not physically present) says a lot about them. In a world where people are very busy and have limited attention, it's important to make the most of people's time when he give it to you. This means being clear about what you want to get across on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn so that you stand out in a sea of generalists. Having a clear biography or description of who you are or who you want to be is important, and it can be helpful to pay specialists to review and recommend updates for your personal online presence.
Nader talks about his experience in a photo shoot that helped them get more opportunities by having a clear and consistent profile picture. He emphasize the importance of specialization in a specific field instead of blending in with everyone else. He advise spending more time than others on a particular technology or skill to become really good at it, which leads to more opportunities and continuous optimization. Nader also suggests linking all social media and online profiles to direct people to the main thing you want them to know about you. It is vital to assume that everyone is time constrained and to be concise and stand out in a job application or online presence.

Online presence / social media

Nader recommends "learning in public" by sharing what you're learning online, including code snippets, GitHub repos, and short videos. This can lead to opportunities and building relationships. It's important to be consistent, helpful without expecting anything in return, and authentic. Being authentic may feel uncomfortable, but it is important for building genuine relationships.
To be authentic on social media, you should be yourself and not focus on pleasing everyone else. Engage with influential people in your desired field and interact with them positively. It's important to be consistent on social media and find a balance between engaging and being gimmicky. Use tactics that draw attention without relying too heavily on clickbait. Additionally, consider backlinking your social media profiles on Stack Overflow.
To increase engagement on social media, it's important to link to all of your other socials and use rich media such as videos and images. Be authentic and true to yourself, even if it means going against what your audience wants. Format your writing with proper spacing and headers, and consider collaborating with others to reach a larger audience.

Content creation

Nader emphasized the importance of stepping out of one's comfort zone for successful content creation. Learning something new and condensing it into understandable information presents an opportunity for effective teaching and sharing with others. Nader's process involves learning, building, and using the new knowledge to create content, such as building an app to better understand technical content.
Nader discusses his process of open sourcing a project, documenting it in a blog post, creating a tutorial video, and using it for conference talks and workshops. He explain the benefits of reusing content in different formats and creating resources to help others. He encourage content creators to not be intimidated if something has already been done before and to document his own solutions to problems.
Nader advises to not be discouraged if someone else has already created a project or solved a problem, but instead to try and improve upon it or add his own unique touch. He suggest tapping into other networks for scale and specialize in one thing rather than being mediocre at many things. Lastly, he suggest mixing existing ideas to create something new and innovative. The idea of "good artists borrow, but great artists steal" applies to technical content creation.

What are some creative ways for bloggers to monetize his social media presence beyond traditional sponsorships or ads?
Suman Giri
100 Devs, Nepal

Consulting is an often overlooked way to monetize your skills. By identifying companies in need of technical content for his DevRel team, you can offer your services on a monthly basis and charge a significant amount, such as $5,000 a month. Many companies have large budgets for this type of service and it can be a big value for them. By offering consulting services, you can make more money, do less work, and build better relationships with clients.

Is ad revenue worth adding?? Since it reduces the quality of the blog.. Please suggest some alternatives for it
Devarshi Shimpi
ByteMakers. India

It's not worth adding advertisements unless you're a massive company because the value you get from the traffic is often not much. Instead, you can subcontract as a consultant or contractor for a company looking for DevRel support and earn more money without showing ads. You can still put some content on your own blog.

What resources do you use to effectively manage social media? I have a hard time dealing with that.
Saswat Pal Pal

To be effective on social media, it is important to choose a few platforms to focus on and not attempt to do everything. TikTok and Twitter are great platforms for creating technical content. Once you have created content, you can duplicate it and share it on other platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. The key is to focus on a few platforms, instead of trying to be active on everything.

Would you please explain with a help of an example that how do you present a content that is presented before with a new touch?
Yug Borana
School, India

A developer created an open source project by converting Python code for chat GPT plugins into JavaScript. This led to consulting opportunities, despite not being able to take them due to being busy. The developer notes that there are many tutorials for popular topics, and one can simply present his own view on the subject to gain traction.

How to write good content and what are the points we should always keep in mind while writting
Ankita thakur thakur
India

Creating good content involves teaching complex topics in an easy to understand way, condensing information into something concise, and having a high-quality title that engages readers. To achieve this, one should choose a topic he are interested in, make the content digestible for all levels of the audience, and simplify complex topics without being too basic. If these are accomplished, then the content is successful.

Please what's your advice to someone who doesn't like learning in public to leverage technical writing to attract opportunities. I personally get anxiety from public learning but I'm enjoy sharing technical content on social media
Stephany Ikebudu
Nigeria

Nader shares technical content as part of his "learning in public" process of experimenting and sharing what he've learned. He believe that everyone creating and sharing content is also learning in public. The main idea is to put things out into the world and make them valuable to others, and consistency is key. However, if someone is uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the whole process, it's okay to just share the end product.

Building Your Personal Brand on Social Media by [Ákos Kőműves]

The presentation was great, and now it's time to start building your personal brand on social media. Ákos offers fresh insights on how he have built his own personal brand and considers a good joke about imposter syndrome. Let's get started!

Ákos introduces himself as a programmer with over 20 years of experience and a former CTO who now freelances and enjoys writing. He then explains four simple reasons why building a personal brand on social media is beneficial, including having access to necessary tools, being able to use different platforms, having no competition, and there being few rules to follow. Ákos notes that the presentation will focus on Twitter, but the advice applies to other platforms as well. Ákos promises to explain any caveats in building a personal brand on social media.

Simple Tools

To build your personal brand, you will need good writing skills, including copywriting and tech writing, to capture people's attention and promote your content on various platforms. Repurposing content is also important across different platforms like newsletters, blogs, and social media. Writing helps you discover efficient systems, such as starting with a title and summarizing ideas into bullet points. Idea generation is also a crucial component of building your personal brand.
The first tool you need to build your personal brand is writing skills. It's hard at first to come up with ideas, but the more you write, the easier it gets. Storytelling is important for building your personal brand, and you have to work on constantly improving your writing. The second tool is a filter to ensure you put out quality content that will attract the right audience. You have to think about whether your content is useful and beneficial to others, rather than just doing it for likes.

Simple to Build

Ákos discusses the simple tools needed to build a personal brand on social media platforms. He compare social media platforms to operating systems and highlight the three-step algorithm users go through before deciding to follow and connect with a brand or individual. The first step is making a good impression, as impressions are closely correlated with profile visits. The ultimate goal is to encourage users to visit your profile and connect, allowing you to build your personal brand.
There are two ways to get impressions on social media- posting content and interacting with other people. Engaging with others who already have a big audience can give you more visibility, particularly if you're starting out with no followers. This can be done by making meaningful contributions to discussions and being noticed by others who may want to check out your profile. However, it is not recommended to use chat GPT enhanced addons to spam replies as it can be annoying and have a negative impact on your reputation. People tend to remember negative experiences more than positive ones.
When people see your reply, he may not respond but he will remember you. The decision of whether to follow someone on social media happens quickly, usually within seconds of looking at his profile. Therefore, it's important to have a simple and clear profile with a short statement about what you do, where to start, and a link. Having too many links can be overwhelming and discourage people from engaging with you. This is the final step in a simple algorithm for building your social media presence.

No Compitition

The point being made is that when building a personal brand, there is no competition as long as you remember to add personal elements to your content. Simply posting a lot of generic material without adding personal touches will not make for a successful personal brand. Adding unique and personal elements, such as sharing pictures of firewood purchased or hobbies such as knife throwing or archery, will make your personal brand stand out and eliminate competition.

No Rules

Ákos discusses three things related to social media: reposting of content by others, dealing with gurus who use tactics Ákos doesn't approve of, and the unpredictability of social media algorithms. Ákos advises not engaging with reposted content or getting upset with gurus, and encourages adapting to changes in social media algorithms.

Bonus

The presenter ends his talk with a bonus slide about a positive social media game in which everyone works together to achieve a higher goal without winners or losers. He encourage sharing learnings and being a part of the building in public movement to make the game even more positive. Thank you for listening to his presentation.

Which pattern is better for blog to attain more audience, always choose unique topics or to choose common topics
Vaibhav Jain
India

Ákos suggests that the approach to blogging depends on your goals. He personally prefer unique topics and do not focus solely on technical writing. He start his articles by addressing a problem he have solved. While popular topics can help gain more audience, unique topics may be more fulfilling to write about. Ultimately, if quantity is the goal, popular topics may be faster and easier to reach a broad audience.

Is there any trick or hacks to increase social media following?
Wisdom Ovhemerutho-Athe
Nigeria

Ákos admits to knowing many hacks and tricks to attract a large audience quickly, but he do not recommend using them. Instead, he suggest focusing on creating valuable content and caring about your audience for long-term success and building a personal brand. The hacks may work, but he take time and effort, and relying on them is not ideal.

Share some tips on how to ignore if your content is copied
Amanpreet Singh
India

The advice is to ignore any negative or unnecessary comments on social media as quickly as possible. It's important to think about the long term and building a personal brand, so don't get caught up in small things like someone copying your tweets. It's better to avoid responding impulsively and focus on your goals in the long run.

can you please tell or provide us the names of this tool as well . We would love to use them as he also help in upskill as well as it aslo increasing our productivity
Omkar Ramishte Ramishte
na

Ákos tried three tools for scheduling tweets and recommends Typefully as it is the cheapest option and also works for LinkedIn. He suggest checking out the free plan.

As a beginner should we post varieties of stuff like jokes,tech,sports or should be only focused about our niche like only tech and blogging what do you suggest?
Nikhil Mishra Mishra
Netaji Subhash Enqineerinq College, India

Ákos encourages personal touches in personal branding. He suggest focusing on one main topic for content and being selective about what is posted, considering if it will benefit the audience in some way. Personal posts can be added for a more personal factor, but should be in a small ratio compared to helpful content. Ákos has a strong filter for what he post and think before posting.

What's the best way to choose a specific niche for your personal brand? (When you're interested in multiple topics)
Penaaz Valecha
Scoutfio, India

Ákos wrote a blog post on how to choose a niche. His advice is to consider what is most enjoyable for you to write about, as he personally can't write about things he don't enjoy. This is his top priority when deciding what to write about.

How will you promote your blog post or documentation? Will you use social media, email marketing, or other channels to reach your target audience?
Nithish Vaithya
India

Ákos is discussing how social blogging platforms like hash note can do the promotion for you, which is why he are beneficial. However, you can also promote your blog posts through Twitter or by learning about SEO and how Google indexes content. SEO can help you gain long term traffic and solid gains in terms of visits to your blog posts by attracting more readers.

How much time one should to give on writing a quality content
Adarsh Rawat
GEHU Dehradun, India

Quality content is not necessarily perfect content, but rather content that serves its purpose and helps, motivates, or entertains others. Time invested in creating quality content should be based on how much time is needed to produce understandable and beneficial content for readers. Focus on creating the next piece of content and don't stress about being perfect.

Wrap Up

Hey guys, Day 2 of the Hashnode Bootcamp on Mastering the Art of Technical Writing is over! We learned a lot from the speakers Nader Dabit @dabit3 and Ákos Kőműves about how to make money and build a personal brand on social media. It was super helpful and I hope you guys learned a lot too!
Also, a big thank you to Dani Passos @danielapassos for being an awesome host and making the session so fun and interactive!

Thank you for reading!
Soumyadeep Mandal @imsampro