Three days ago I launched a major update to RepoSweeper — a tool for bulk managing GitHub repos (delete, archive, change visibility, AI commit summaries, etc.).
Here's everything I did to promote it:
- Published a new Medium article
- Posted on our LinkedIn company page (0 followers)
- Posted here on dev.to (0 followers — hi 👋)
- Updated a 2018 article about the original version of the app, adding a paragraph pointing to the new one
Here's what actually happened to traffic (Cloudflare, unique visitors):
| Date | Unique Visitors |
|---|---|
| Feb 8–17 avg | ~220/day |
| Feb 18 | 451 |
| Feb 19 | 589 |
| Feb 20 | 336 |
| Feb 21 | 327 |
Nearly 3x baseline on day 2. Signups went from ~1/day to 3–4/day.
So what drove it?
Not LinkedIn. Not dev.to. Not the new Medium article — it has 20 reads.
It was a 2018 article: "The Easiest Way To Delete Multiple GitHub Repositories At Once" — a simple how-to I wrote right after bootcamp when I first built the app. It has 25K reads accumulated over 7 years, mostly from Google.
- Before I updated it: ~2 reads/day (basically dead)
- After adding a single paragraph at the top linking to the new version: 9 → 16 → 12 reads/day
Those readers are hitting the site.
The lesson
If you've been writing about your work for years, you have assets you've forgotten about. Old tutorials. Old how-tos. Old "I built this" posts. They're sitting on Google's index, quietly collecting readers.
Updating one takes 10 minutes. Building a new audience from zero takes months.
I'm not saying don't post new content. I'm saying: before you grind to build a new following from scratch, go check what you already have.
What's the oldest thing you've published that's still getting traffic?
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