Attracting potential customers with articles


    Many who read my previous post “ Getting Feedback from Potential Users ” came to the conclusion that the result is zero to attract the attention of potential customers. This is not so, there is attention. We have already found one good source of attracting attention. These are articles and blogs. But this source remains almost the only one, and this is what worries us, and we are looking for new options.

    This time I will share my positive experience in promoting a startup based on the writing and publication of articles. I hope that our experience in this matter may be useful to readers.



    First of all, the text of the article must be written. It is not possible to recommend a method for writing good articles. This is a creative process, and therefore I will consider only one important technical component.

    We try to write articles so that no matter what site it is published on, a person will learn about our PVS-Studio product. Many are chasing unique content. We are exactly the opposite. The more our articles will be on other sites, the better. And we are even happy with the theft of our content. It does not matter where the person reads the article, the main thing is that he read it.

    I will explain this position. Of course, if a person comes to an article on our site at some request, this is better than coming to our own article, but on a third-party site. However, we cannot compete with the popularity of sites such as Intel, CodeProject. And a person on request can easily go to such a site, despite the fact that our site more meets his request. Therefore, it is better that he reads our articles on another site than he does not read at all.

    There is another advantage of publishing articles on other good sites. This is an increase in the ranking of our site due to good links in articles. Yes, this way you can’t get a lot of links. But they are free, eternal, they are seen by living people, and they lead to us sites from Page Rank up to 8 inclusive. We never bought links or somehow paid for the promotion, but now our site has Page Rank 5. We believe that this is achieved due to the chosen policy of publishing articles with links to other decent sites.

    However, Page Rank 5 is just a nice bonus. If the Page Rank of our site becomes 0, this will not change ANYTHING. People will still find and read our articles on different sites and come to us.

    And now for the fun part. I will talk about my experience publishing technical articles on programming at various sites. Naturally, the articles are related to the product we are promoting. I am sure that this experience will be interesting and useful to many readers involved in promoting tools for developers.

    CodeProject


    This is the best site for publishing programming articles. I will not further organize sites in the order of their usefulness, but I deliberately placed CodeProject in the first place. It can be said that I give the first place to this site, and the sites that I will consider further share second and third places.

    Page Rank is 7. A huge number of readers, the most convenient system for publishing and maintaining an article. It is possible to maintain a blog than we do .

    Articles are moderated, but it is quite loyal. More strict control is exercised by the readers themselves. And if they do not like the article, then the moderator removes it. We had a similar removal experience. I deleted two more articles myself, watching the comments and not waiting for the moderator to act.

    Removal was a completely justifiable action. What a sin to conceal - so-so were articles. And it’s even good that they deleted it - it stimulates the writing of better texts. And gradually it turned out.

    Our two articles [ 1 , 2 ] won the nomination “Best Articles of the Month”, due to which I received the status of a “golden author” and now I publish articles without any prior moderation. In general, we live with this site very friendly.

    Oh yes. There is also a catalog of programs for developers on the site where you can post information about your decision. Including for free. Here, for example, is the page of our product.

    Great site! Come. There is something to read. There is an opportunity to tell about yourself. The audience is large and adequate.

    CodeGuru


    Page Rank is 7. A good programming site, although perhaps a little overloaded with advertising, which is why reading articles on it is not so pleasant.

    Moderation is more stringent than on CodeProject, and usually it takes several days to wait. Repeatedly refused to publish not very good articles. A good, decent site, trying to keep quality material.

    Dreamincode


    Page Rank is 5. A

    decent site, focused on communication developers. Moderation of articles is not strict. Almost all the articles that I proposed were published. By the way, a good place for laying out Tutorial, since there is a corresponding section.

    Realcode


    The easiest to use Russian site dedicated to programming. I just write a letter to the site administrator with a proposal to publish a new article, and he does it himself. So nice :)

    In general, a very friendly site in terms of communication with the administration. I recommend to pay attention. Page Rank is 4.

    Gamedev


    The largest game development site. Page Rank is 7. It requires the uniqueness of the material. After an article has been published for several months, it cannot be published anywhere else. Enough heavy restriction. Similarly, we published only one article, “ Development of resource-intensive applications in Visual C ++, ” which was specifically written for this resource.

    However, everything is relative. And they themselves proposed to publish the article " 20 issues of porting C ++ code on the 64-bit platform ", despite the fact that by that time it had been published on a number of sites. They also gladly post links to external articles.

    As an added benefit, it’s possible to get into the printed collection of articles that they regularly publish.

    Go4expert


    A site for developers to communicate. Page Rank is 6. Moderation of articles is weak. There is a section where you can post Products Review, which is extremely useful.

    Note. Internet Explorer behaves badly in an article publishing system, and sometimes freezes. I recommend immediately using Opera or another browser.

    The site is easy to use. In general, I recommend, like everyone else.

    Dtf


    Russian website of game developers. A semi-closed community and to get into it you need to make some efforts. Page Rank is 5.

    The administration reacted to our articles well, but the community did not accept them very well and we published only 5 articles there. The reason is apparently that we got ahead of time and wrote about 64-bit, too early. Almost all games are still 32-bit and there is no end in sight. Yesterday I was once again convinced of this by talking with game developers at KRI2010.

    Vingrad.ru


    A large forum of Russian developers. There is a section of articles. A very busy site. Page Rank is 4.
    I can’t write anything special about this site, but I recommend it.

    Articles.org.ru


    A large catalog of articles on programming in Russian. There you can post links to articles. Page Rank is 4. The site looks overloaded, but contains a lot of useful information.

    Note. Do not use Opera. She's crazy about this site.

    CodeNet.ru


    A good Russian site for developers. It has a good Page Rank of 6. Rarity for Russian-language sites. He published articles through the administration of the site, which, as you know, saves a lot of effort.

    Intel


    To be precise, I'm not talking about the Intel site itself, but about ISN (Intel software Network). ISN - a community of software developers, a direct link with Intel engineers.

    Page Rank is 8. Elephant among programming sites. A huge amount of information, articles, blogs, forums. But there is one drawback - poor structuring, which makes it difficult for readers to find the right information. Search, unfortunately, also does not always help. Too many product and technology reviews. However, in any case, a very powerful site.

    It’s hard to work with the site, although it's worth it. It is easy to become an ISN member and write in the forums. But with articles and a blog more difficult. Rather, it’s not difficult to write, but there is a high probability that it will be necessary to talk with a moderator in order to “push through” your article. At first, working with the site was very difficult, but when I gained credibility, I began to be considered a full-fledged author and can post articles, as in the case of CodeProject without first checking by a moderator. In general, in the beginning, one must tolerate and show adequacy and correctness. Further it will be easier.

    What is adequacy? For example, do not write on the Intel website about AMD products. ;)

    The process of publishing articles of medium complexity. However, which is good, the engine normally digests even gigantic articles. Sometimes useful.

    There are some more benefits from publishing articles on the Intel website. They are indirect but useful. If there is interest, I will disclose this question in more detail.

    Intel RU


    Russian ISN . So far little-known programming resource. But in vain. I invite everyone! The administration in the person of Dmitry Oganezov makes many efforts to attract qualified specialists in the field of programming in ISN. So there is someone to talk to. The audience is serious, but friendly.

    In addition, Dmitry Oganezov is easily accessible, which is important for such communities. You can discuss and solve many issues with him. For example, thanks to him, we proposed and created a forum ( to EN ), devoted to the 64-bit mode. Another thing is that people are not enough. But you come, and there will be many! :)

    With the publication of articles, the situation is simpler than in the case of the English section. And again thanks to the administration. In general, I highly recommend the Russian ISN !

    DDJ


    Grandfather among programming sites. Page Rank is 8. Working with the site is extremely difficult. Directly publish articles from them failed. But they took some of our articles on parallelism from the Intel site. Now we have only four articles published on this site.

    Moderation is strong. This is not even moderation. They just partially rewrite the article.

    I can’t say that I recommend the site. Rather, the site is good, but the result may not justify the amount of effort spent. Decide for yourself.

    Multicoreinfo


    Here I post a description of our articles on parallelism. Page Rank is 3. The site is not very famous. But then, for example, from here some kind of news can take DDJ. It was like that with us. We posted a press release about VivaMP , and after a while it appeared on DDJ.

    Multicore.ning.com


    This is a parallel programming blog site. Accordingly, I do there some posts on this topic. Page Rank is 3. The site is not remarkable. There are simply not many sites dedicated to parallel programming.

    Progz.ru


    At my request, the administrator has published several articles. I worked with this site a little, but I think that I will pay more attention to it in the future.

    Gotdotnet


    My colleague leads a company blog there. I know little about the site, but I recommend it.

    Did not work out


    And now a little about the sites that failed. This does not mean that the sites are bad. Perhaps we were just unlucky with them and you will have different results. I am writing for the fact that if someone also "does not go right away", then they did not waste their energy. I’ll warn you that it can be difficult.

    msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag - Before that, we apparently have not grown (Page Rank is 9). It was not possible to establish contact with the editors.
    gp.embarcadero.com - Looks like a good article posting site. Note. It's just too early for us. In C ++ Builder, there is neither 64-bit, nor OpenMP. :)
    www.devx.com - it didn’t.
    ieeexplore.ieee.org - did not go.
    www.sdtimes.com - it didn’t.
    visualstudiomagazine.com- did not go.
    code-magazine.com - did not go.
    www.informit.com - it didn’t.
    www.cplusplus.com - The maximum article length is 8 kilobytes. :) The article is not posted. No one answers the questions. In general, the site is dead, although it exists. Further similar sites I will call zombies .
    www.topcoder.com - zombies.
    www.cprogramming.com - zombies.
    www.secureprogramming.com - zombies.
    windowshpc.net - zombies.
    www.devarticles.com - did not go. Half zombie. :)
    www.developerfusion.co.uk - zombies. Although it seems to be resurrected. Worth checking out.
    www.programmers-corner.com - did not go.
    www.programmingforums.org - did not go.
    bytes.com - deleted all my articles, apparently counting them as spam. Well, God bless them.
    www.winhpc.ru - zombies (the grant has ended and the site is also :).

    PS Now there will be comments that I forgot about the site xxx, yyy and so on. Write. Perhaps we really missed something valuable from the sites. I just want to explain that there were good luck / failure with other sites. But to describe everything is too much. :)

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