Attracting the attention of potential customers through articles

Many who read my previous post " Getting a response from potential users " came to the conclusion that no matter what we did, to attract the attention of potential customers, the result is zero. This is not so, there is attention. We have already found one good source of attention. These are articles and blogs. But this source remains practically 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 writing and publishing articles. I hope our experience in this matter may be useful to readers.


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First of all, the text of the article must be written. It’s impossible to recommend a good article writing method. This process is creative, and therefore I will consider only one important technical component.

We try to write articles so that no matter which site it is published on, people will learn about our PVS-Studio product. Many chase unique content. We are exactly the opposite. The more of our articles will be on other sites, the better. And we are happy to steal our content. No matter where a person reads an 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 by some request, it is better than coming to our article, but on a third-party site. However, we can not with the popularity of sites such as Intel, CodeProject. And a person upon request can easily go to such a site, despite the fact that our site responds more to his request. Therefore, let him better read our articles on another site than he does not read at all.

There is one more advantage from publishing articles on other good sites. This is an increase in the rating 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 with a page rank of up to 8 inclusive. We never bought links or paid for promotion somehow, but now our site has Page Rank 5. We believe that this is achieved thanks 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, it will not change ANYTHING. People will still find and read our articles on different sites and come to us.

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

CodeProject

This is the best site for publishing programmer articles. I will not further organize the sites in the order of their usefulness, but I deliberately rendered CodeProject in the first place. We can say that I give this site the first place, and the sites that I will consider further share second and third places.

The page rank is 7. A huge number of readers, the most convenient system for publishing and maintaining an article. You can blog what we do as well.

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, the moderator deletes it. We had a similar removal experience. I deleted two more articles myself, watching the comments and not waiting for the moderator to take action.

Deletion was perfectly justified. What a sin to conceal - so-so were the articles. And even it is good that they were deleted - it stimulates the writing of better texts. And gradually it happened.

Our two articles [ 1 , 2 ] won the nomination "The best articles of the month", thanks to which I received the status of "golden author" and now I publish articles in general without prior moderation. In general, we live very friendly with this site.

Oh yes. Another site has a catalog of software for developers, where you can post information about your decision. Including free. For example, our product page .

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

CodeGuru

The Page Rank is 7. A good programmer site, although, perhaps, somewhat overloaded with advertising, which makes reading articles on it not so pleasant.

Moderation is stricter than CodeProject, and usually it has to wait several days. Repeatedly it was denied to publish not very good articles. Good, decent site, trying to keep quality material.

DreamInCode

The page rank is 5.

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 posting the Tutorial, since there is a corresponding section.

Realcoding

The easiest to use Russian site dedicated to programming. I just write to the site administrator a letter 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. The page rank is 4.

Gamedev

The largest game development site. Page Rank is 7. Require uniqueness of the material. After publishing an article for several months, it can not be published anywhere else. Pretty heavy limitation. 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 the article " 20 issues of porting C ++ code on the 64-bit platform " they themselves offered to place in them, despite the fact that by that time it was published on a number of sites. They are also happy to post links to external articles.

As an additional advantage, there is an opportunity to get into a printed collection of articles, which they regularly publish.

Go4expert

Site for communication developers. The page rank is 6. Article moderation is weak. There is a section where you can place Products Review, which is extremely useful.

Note. In the article publishing system, Internet Explorer behaves badly and sometimes freezes. I recommend to immediately use Opera or another browser.

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

DTF

Russian site of game developers. A semi-closed community and to get into it you need to make some effort. The page rank is 5.

The administration treated our articles well, but the community didn’t accept them very much and we published only 5 articles there. The reason is probably that we are ahead of time and wrote about 64 bits, too early. Almost all games are still 32-bit and there’s no end in sight. Yesterday I was once again convinced of this, talking to game developers at KRI2010.

Vingrad.ru

Big forum of Russian developers. There is a section of articles. Very lively site. The page rank is 4.
I can’t write something special about this site, but I recommend it.

Articles.org.ru

Large catalog of articles on programming in Russian. There you can post links to articles. The page rank is 4. The site looks overloaded, but contains a lot of useful information.

Note. Do not use Opera. She is crazy about this site.

CodeNet.ru

Good Russian site for developers. It has a good page rank equal to 6. Uncommon for Russian sites. Published articles through the site administration, as you know, it saves a lot of effort.

Intel

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

The page rank is 8. Elephant among programmer sites. A huge amount of information, articles, blogs, forums. But there is one drawback - poor structuring, which complicates the search for the necessary information by readers. Search, unfortunately, does not always help either. Too many product and technology reviews. However, in any case, a very powerful site.

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

What is adequacy? It is for example not to write on the Intel site about AMD products. ;)

The process of publishing articles of average complexity. However, what is good, the engine normally digests even giant articles. Sometimes useful.

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

Intel RU

Russian isn . So far, a little-known programmer resource. And in vain. I invite everyone! The administration represented by Dmitry Oganezov makes a lot of efforts to attract qualified specialists in the field of programming to ISN. So there is someone to talk to. The audience is serious, but benevolent.

In addition, Dmitry Oganezov is easily accessible, which is important for such communities. With it you can discuss and solve many questions. For example, thanks to him, we proposed and created a forum ( EN ) dedicated to 64-bit issues. Another thing is that the people are still 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

The grandfather among programmer sites. The page rank is 8. Working with the site is extremely difficult. Directly to publish their articles failed. But they took some of our articles on parallelism from the Intel site. Now we have only four articles on this site.

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

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

MulticoreInfo

Here I post a description of our articles on concurrency. The page rank is 3. The site is not very famous. But, for example, from here some news can take a DDJ. With us it was. We placed a press release about VivaMP , and after a while it appeared on the DDJ.

Multicore.ning.com

This is a parallel programming blog site. Accordingly, I make there some posts on this topic. The page rank is 3. The site is not remarkable. Just sites devoted to parallel programming is not so much.

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 keeps a company blog there. I am familiar with the site a little, but I recommend.

Did not work out

And now a little about the sites that did not work. This does not mean that the sites are bad. Perhaps, we are simply unlucky with them and you will have other results. I am writing for the fact that if someone also immediately "does not go," then they did not waste their energy. So I will warn you that it may not be easy.

msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag - Before that, we apparently did not grow (Page Rank is 9). It was not possible to establish contact with the editors.
gp.embarcadero.com - Looks like a suitable site for posting articles. Note. We are just too early. In C ++ Builder, there is neither 64-bit nor OpenMP yet. :)
www.devx.com - not gone.
ieeexplore.ieee.org - not gone.
www.sdtimes.com - did not go.
visualstudiomagazine.com - not gone.
code-magazine.com - did not go.
www.informit.com - did not go.
www.cplusplus.com - Maximum article length is 8 kilobytes. :) The article is not posted. Nobody 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. Semi-zombie :)
www.developerfusion.co.uk - zombies. Although it seems to be resurrected. Worth checking out.
www.programmers-corner.com - not gone.
www.programmingforums.org - not gone.
bytes.com - deleted all my articles, apparently considering them as spam. Well, God bless them.
www.winhpc.ru - zombies (the grant is over and the site too :).

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