Do you cross-post/share anywhere other than DEV?
- Personal Site?
- Hashnode
- Medium
- LinkedIn Article (not post)
Share your experience, and whether cross-posting to anywhere else has helped build your community and drive meaningful engagement.
My current Process
I currently post all articles to my personal site waylonwalker.com, and they show up in my DEV dashboard as a draft. I fix the missing cover image, and language from code blocks and post when ready.
Some posts stop here.
Flagship posts get shared heavily
- DEV
- Newsletter
For flagship posts, I make sure that I share it to Twitter and LinkedIn.
My Twitter account is small beans so it drives very little engagement, that's hardly worth the effort. The same core friends that I have on Twitter also are connected on LinkedIn anyways.
For LinkedIn, I make sure that I summarize the article in 800-1300 characters, as I anticipate most people just read the summary on LinkedIn and move on without clicking the article.
I also attempt to keep up a monthly newsletter where I share all of my articles.
Discuss
Share with us if you have found benefit from cross-posting or sharing your articles somewhere else.
Latest comments (64)
Doesn't cross posting the same content penalize your blog in term of SEO ?
It's important to include a canonical URL. Here is a great article on the hashnode townhall that discusses how to cross post.
townhall.hashnode.com/why-you-shou...
Thanks
I checked out the link from your profile, and your twitter.
@ryanccn you gotta get that personal site up and going
hemant-blogs.netlify.app
Currently, this is mt Blog site, working on Dev.to Api's and fell to share this link anywhere!
Here is the source code:
Hii, This is a blog Designed in React-Js, with Javascript and Love. App Fetches Your Blogs from Dev.to using Dev.to Api
Dev Blogs
Dev Blogs is built in React and Redux which is used to publish your Dev.to Blogs on a custom page.
To customize the blog according to your Dev user id simply follow the Readme (The Steps Below)
Getting Started?
Star the Repo and click the button here >
Click on the above button and config with you Github in Netlify.
After successful netlify config.
Simply go to your profile which would have new Repo, and clone it to your local system
Visit the following folder after clone.
src/DevtoConfig.jsThen change the each section to your details Don't forget the https:// that is used for redirects
In your terminal
Run the following command in you terminal.
npm i && npm startoryarn && yarn startCheers You Blog is live on your System. And on localhost.
If you have any issues with already existing remotes, in…
Also, anyone can generate their dev Blogs, just by changing the config.js file, try the readme.
ThankYou!
That is really cool how you built it. Any plans to pull in comments?
Thanks for your insights @redlotusdesignz
I've heard the same about Reddit. I've tried to post there a few times and I just have no idea what I am doing. I got no engagement.
Any tips to cross-posting to Twitter/LinkedIn? Do you just click the share button, or do you craft custom messages?
Nice, But why should i cross post ? To gain more readers or is there Any other use ?
Yes, many users are only on one platform and not on every single platform. Some will see your content multiple times, but many will only see it in their platform of choice.
Why do we need to post the same thing in different platform ? Instead create a
URL shortnerand point to single platform like dev.to ?@waylon, my process is very similar to yours. The only main difference is that I don't send
any newsletter for now yet. But it's a great suggestion.
I used to have a blog in the past and it was a great time because I made so many friends through it. But I just start a new blog some months ago and I'm trying to find a good way to make people know it. I like the audience that Dev.to has been providing , but I also try to join some GitHub discussions , being present in some slack channels and Twitter as well. By doing this, I'm trying to find what's the best subject that people interact with.
Wow. There are so many interesting suggestions in the comments:
I am still learning the newsletter thing. I have built up a shadow newsletter over the past few months. I was trying to make it a weekly frequency, but that proved difficult to stay ahead of and some subscribers got ahead of me.
I recently changed up all the postings to be monthly.
I've never heard about shadow newsletter before; that's a great idea. I subscribed into your newsletter to follow your emails. 😉
🎉🎉. Awesome, glad to have you aboard
I rarely - very rarely - cross post between Mastodon and Twitter. It has to be something I feel will fit either audience.
I don't post many articles in many places, and those that I do, I don't post about anywhere. I don't make a tweet about my Dev post, for example.
I have no "community" and don't really consider the majority of "engagement" to be meaningful.
I'm literally doing what I do because I feel like it, not with a goal in mind - not a goal of reaching more people, anyway.
That is a perfectly acceptable approach. Post for yourself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. No need to stress over it. Thanks for adding your personal story to the discussion.
Hey @waylonwalker , great discussion topic – it got certainly got me me thinking!
The single source of truth for my articles will always be my self-hosted blog. I'm a fan and proponent of the #indieweb – I think it's important that we own our content. It also provides a great platform for experimentation and self-expression that I often don't get the opportunity to indulge in on commercial projects.
That said, reach is a big issue and unless you've already garnered an audience that either frequently checks your website or receives updates via RSS, a newsletter, or Social Media, it can often feel like shouting into a void.
POSSE is a great pattern – whether automated, semi-automated, or entirely manual – for owning your content, but increasing the chances of it actually reaching your audience.
For a while now I've been using GitHub Actions to syndicate my posts to DEV. I used to use the RSS sync feature, but there's far too much manual tweaking required after their
HTML -> Markdowntransformation step.Your post introduced me to Hashnode and I'm now in the process of setting up a publication there so that I can begin syndicating my content to a 2nd platform.
I usually promote my articles on Twitter, but get little interaction these days (perhaps due to my limited use of the platform in general). I'll be sure to muster the courage to post to Reddit one of these days, too 😉
Thanks for the food for thought 👍
Your site looks really good by the way.
Thanks Waylon, yours too 👍 Great job on all the articles 👏
I really like the #indieweb, and the POSSE pattern! I am trying to do better at consistently posting this year. That has skyrocketed my engagement/audience from where it was. There is no hack that makes up for not putting the work in.
I also just set up hashnode. It seems really cool, but I was a bit hesitant to maintain comments/community on even more platforms, but I am going to make the jump.
How do you syndicate with Actions! I would love to do this. The RSS feed misses my cover image and all of the language blocks.
Really good point about consistency – I wonder what the psychology is there? Are people more likely to follow if there's some guarantee of seeing fresh content regularly?
Regarding Hashnode, it seems like there's a history between DEV and itself. I have to say that the overall user experience on Hashnode feels somewhat lacking. It opens far too many links in new tabs and there are very apparent "seams" between the Hashnode site and individual publications. I've cross-posted a single article for now and will take some more time to evaluate the platform before setting up any automated syndication I think.
I'll tidy-up the Action, push it to GitHub, and then post a link to this thread so that you can get the general idea 👍