Content strategy for independent developers
This is based on the book "Show Your Work!" by Austin Kleon
Daily Posting
One of the biggest things I learned from that was —
Start with a small piece of work that you post every day.
Keep it about 30 minutes per day, and that can be posted to any channel.
As you go along, that one thing becomes something you can format and turn into a larger thing.
I like to think of it as a "bottom-to-top" approach instead of a "top-to–bottom"
This piece of content should come from what work you were doing that day.
What to Post
- Learnings — note any learnings you had
- Work in progress — before or after (doesn't have to be a long post, even a tweet is fine)
- Metrics
- Inspiration
- References
- Methods and process
Where to post if you have multiple projects?
I was struggling to figure out where to post content because I have two projects going on, and I want to post for my personal blog.
Currently, I have a single domain for a personal blog, where I'll post my daily updates.
I'll link to the other projects' domains from my main blog, so any traffic from here can go to those.
And in the future, if I have any polished content that I want to post specifically for those other projects, I'll do that — but I'm not setting any fixed timeline or requirement for it.
Weekly Schedule
- Monday–Friday: daily posts
- Saturday: no post — instead, spend time reviewing the past week's work to see if there's something cohesive I can combine into a larger piece (like a video)
- Overall: six days of posting, with the sixth day being more like a weekly update or a combination of the others
This frees up a lot of the expectations around posts — it's not fixed that I have to make an extremely large, high-value video or whatever. I think the main key is keeping it flexible for myself, and then being consistent with that.
Examples
Example 1: One of the posts I did yesterday — I was aiming for it to be a guide on how to implement something, but I didn't have time to flesh it out fully. So I just stated where I was at with it: my main hypothesis, the use case, current functionality, till where I had built it, how I was planning to use it (not "you should do this and that," but how I plan on using it), and then added next steps — what I need to do and what's pending.
waterboy
Example 2: A post that's like a formula to track consistency — this is an update on the habit tracker app. It's an extremely short blog on a new feature, a simple formula on how the feature is built. That's an example of that.
waterboy