Promotion: Getting my content in-front of more people
I have been creating content for many years now. One of the big questions is always how to make my content reach more people.
I mean I believe that my content is valuable and that for some people this is the right way to learn the stuff that I teach.
For example when I look at the videos of the Programming Bootcamp. I think the material is really good. The feedback I usually get from my students in my live classes is really positive.
On the other hand the first video has some 200 views. The second video only 100 views. The later videos have even less. this also includes the people who watched the videos when we did not have class-room courses during Covid and I experimented by recording the videos.
My other videos don't have a lot of views either.
My whole YouTube channel has only 2,624 subscribers. In the case of the Hebrew videos the numbers are even lower. The Hebrew YouTube channel has only 284 subscribers. So most of the videos only have a few tens of views.
How to get more viewers
So my question is how to get more viewers.
On Twitter I could not build followers and it might be shutting down anyway.
On LinkedIn I have a few pages that have a few hundred followers (less than 1000 each) and I have more than 4,000 connections and followers. Still I get only a handful of likes and very few comments on my posts.
I tried Facebook, but I could not manage to build follower there either.
I guess part of the reason is that I give up too soon. The other reason might be that I am not doing well for the respective platforms. I post links for a few days/weeks, but when I hardly see any feedback, I get myself busy with some other thing and I don't see any big impact.
A few weeks ago I started to republish many of the private videos and post on both the Perl Maven and Code Maven sites. I also started to record new videos and send Pull-Request to various Open Source projects including videos describing the Pull-Request.
I started to see some increase in the number of followers on YouTube, but it is still only a few more followers and no substantial increase in the number of likes and/or in the number of views on the videos.
So I started a number of new initiatives:
Videos about Open Source projects
I am recording videos about Open Source projects and share the video with the author of the project. At first I was recording videos about the pull-request I created for the projects. Mostly about configuring GitHub actions for them.
I also plan to create videos about how to use these projects and open an issue on their GitHub project asking the author to include the video in the documentation if it is valuable for them.
I also started to look for other directions to promote the videos:
YouTube Shorts and Instagram
A few weeks ago I recorded two videos in Hebrew. Under one minute each and in a vertical setting so they can be uploaded as "shorts" to YouTube and can be also uploaded to Instagram and to LinkedIn. My kids were not very enthusiastic about the quality of the videos. It was a bit of turning off. Partially because of that, partially because I was busy with other things I have not continued that, but maybe I should record and publish more.
I opened two Subreddits: One for English content and one for Hebrew content. The former already has 10 members, the latter only has me. I was hoping to be able to attract more follower and then to share my content there so I won't need to post on the various other Subreddits that might be considered spam.
The problem is that I have no idea how to increase the number of followers.
DEV.to
DEV is nice. It is easy to post there articles. It allows me to include the canonical URL of the page and includes it in the header of the page. If I understand correctly this means that Google will transfer all the Google Juice accumulated by these pages to the original pages.
So I started to repost some of my articles. Or rather some of the videos.
I am not really sure that reposting my content is a good idea, but I'll give it a try. This can bring in more viewers to the videos. More followers on YouTube and at the end my name gets around more. So maybe that will bring more clients as well.
I posted four entries there. I got a few likes, but so far less than 25 people looked at either one of them. That's quite disappointing.
Similarweb tells us that dev.to has 13.3M monthly visits, 5.6M unique visitors. The visit duration is 1:33 min and the bounce rate is 76.72% People visit 1.58 page per session. It is ranked number 7,162 in the world. The category ranking is 123. It is most popular in India from where 10.25% of the visits come. USA being the second with 9.94% and then Vietnam is 3rd with 4.06%, and Poland with 3.63%, Brazil with 3.59, Germany 2.94%, France 2.82%, Turkey 2.82%, Indonesia 2.15%, Nigeria 2.01%, United Kingdom is 11th with 1.95% ... Israel is 39th with 0.71%.
Apparently the primary source of the referred visitors is daily.dev
Cost and Value
What are my costs?
The cost of gaining the knowledge. In many cases I either already know the stuff or I have to learn it because of some job at a client. So that's irrelevant.
In some cases I need to put in additional time and energy to learn some of the topics I talk about. So that's a real cost, but then this knowledge also helps me at clients.
Preparing the slides and examples is a related cost, but that also helps me remember things and later I can copy-paste from my examples.
The direct costs are the recording of the videos and writing the articles.
Then I have the "marketing" cost. That is sharing my posts on the various channels.
The value is created as more people reach my website or watch my videos on YouTube.
The value to me then is either if people start to support me or if they invite me to run a training or provide some consulting for their company.
Conclusion
So that's where am at now.
I really need to find a way to get my content in-front of a lot more people.