A lot of developers struggle with promoting their projects and are unsure whether they should promote them at all. In this post, I'll cover all the steps you need to take to get people interested in your project and find more collaborators.
First step - think of your target audience
Who is going to benefit from your project, and how? Write the benefits of using your project in your Readme.md, don't just explain what it does and how it works.
How are you going to collaborate with others and manage all the incoming PRs and issues? Set up some clear contribution guidelines and think of using style guides. Here's an example of a well-explained project - render_async 🚀
Second step - Reach out to your dev friends
Reach out to your friends or ask for feedback from other community members. Do others like your project? Do they find it useful? Ask for feedback as early as possible.
Third step - Write about it
I've already written about how to write your posts. What you need to do is write a post about your project that you can share or republish on various websites, forums, or discussion channels.
Help people to understand your motives for building the project, make the post engaging and invite them to help you out. Here are 2 examples of such posts that I really liked.
- Speeding Up Rendering Rails Pages with render_async
- Introducing Codier - Front-end Coding Challenges and Creations
Fourth step - Share it all over the web
Find where your target audience is and then share the news with them. Unless you talk about your project, you can't expect others to hear about it. Most people avoid sharing things in non-friendly communities but keep in mind that a few negative comments are a small percentage of the real audience you're reaching out to. I'm looking at you Reddit 🧐
So, without further ado, here's a list of places where you can promote your projects:
- Personal Twitter account (mention relevant accounts in your tweet)
- Personal LinkedIn profile
- Personal Facebook profile
- Hacker News
- Hashnode
- Dev.to
- Medium
- Relevant Facebook groups
- Relevant LinkedIn groups
- Relevant Slack channels
- Relevant Discord channels
Specific groups
Depending on the language and the community, there might be some specific websites you'll want to check out. Here are a few that came to my mind. Please let me know if there are more websites I can mention in this section. 😁
Ruby
Elixir
Clojure
Scala
Bonus project promotion ideas
- Participate in projects such as Hacktoberfest,
- Apply to speak at conferences,
- Appear as a guest on a relevant podcast, and
- Guest post on relevant blogs with original content (e.g. FreeCodeCamp).
That's it!
I hope you found this project promotion checklist helpful and that you'll now reach as many fellow developers as possible! Which techniques have you been using so far? Did I miss any? Please let me know in the comments below. 😎
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