Promoting your blog post

Once you have published your blog post, you want to drive some readership there.

There is no silver bullet to getting readers to your content! If there was, the Marketing Industry would be pointless :)

Below you find some general observations, and a summary of recommendations.

Use your own network

We recommend you share the post

on your own social media accounts (e.g. twitter, facebook, linkedin)
in the #engineering channel in Slack, so that all colleagues see it, and can distribute it. You can also point them to your social media posts from (1), so that folks can retweet/like/fav/whatever.

Use relevant forums (hackernews/reddit/etc)

Unless you already have a high karma account the most effective way of getting your article to the front page of Hacker News is to get someone else to post it.

Karma plays a huge role in how successfully an article can climb, to the extent where posts from a low karma account will often remain buried. It’s also ineffective to recruit friends to upvote a post since the forum is already well equipped to spot inorganic activity and will silently ignore it. Also, articles that are posted more than once are suppressed algorithmically and sometimes can even be blocked, so posting from a low karma account could be a wasted opportunity.

Luckily, there are lots of high karma users on HN that post any interesting articles they find on smaller subreddits.

Therefore, our advice is the following:

reddit: Post your article on all of the subreddits that are appropriate. Wait
hackernews (HN): Do nothing. Hope that somebody finds your post on reddit, and then posts it to HN.
relevant forums: share the post on forums that are related to the topic you are writing about e.g. if you are writing about Elasticsearch you might want to publish your post on discuss.elastic.co/c/ecosystem. So if you don’t know them already, it is worth looking for forums that discuss the topic you have written about.