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  • 🍐 #24: How to POC programmatic SEO, Github star CTA, and reddit ads format

🍐 #24: How to POC programmatic SEO, Github star CTA, and reddit ads format

Author

Jakub Czakon
June 17, 2023

Hey,

What is the best way to keep your pears fresh? Use tup-pear 🍐 ;)

Some personal news this week.
I decided to give advising a proper go. 
Let me know if you’d like to work with me ->

Today on the agenda:

  • Programmatic SEO from Datree (+ how to POC it)

  • Sticky "star us on GitHub" from Posthog

  • Meme Reddit ad from Featureform

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. Programmatic SEO from Datree

Itamar Ben Yair is an awesome dev marketer who shares his journey on Linkedin and recently started a Dev Marketer newsletter.

In his recent post he shared how inspired by Snyk Advisor they sat down to build a programmatic SEO project for Datree, Helm Chart DB.

I am not going to go through everything (his post just explains it really well 😉 ) but one thing stood out for me.

Thinking about building it pragmatically, as a startup should.

A project like that takes a lot of time and you don’t want to invest it blind. Especially when you don’t have a lot of those resources.

So what they did was create a POC:

  • Just a single page build and filled by hand

  • Google ads pushing traffic to that page

And with that, they could prove the ROI quickly and proceed to build the entire project with confidence.

2. Sticky "star us on GitHub" from Posthog

OK, the best way of getting GitHub stars is by creating a project that solves real developer problems really well.

But I assume you have done that already.

How do you boost those ⭐ even more?

I mean you got to ask people one way or another.

Many companies put it in their navbars or hello bars.

Posthog adds a sticky banner at the bottom of the page that follows you as you scroll.

It also shows a start count which at their size (11k + stars) acts as social proof.

You can close it and the next time you visit the page it will be off not to push too much.

I like the concept makes sense to test it out this way imho.

3. Meme Reddit ad from Featureform

How to run developer-focused Reddit ads that get upvoted?

Reddit is well known for anti-promotional sentiments.

Just post something along the lines "you can solve that with our dev tool" and see.

So running ads on Reddit feels even more like a no-no.

Especially if you add problems with bot clicks and attribution as most devs will have some sort of blocks.

But you know your audience is on Reddit.

And for some of us, it may very well be the only social platform they are on.

So what do you do?

This is how Featureform approached it to get almost 100 upvotes on an ad:

  • They start with a simple conversational copy pointing at their target users’ pains

  • They agitate target users’ pains in their language (lots of jargony terms, tools, and problems)

  • They use very devy language, likely rooted in deep user understanding (voice of customer)

  • They don't talk about their product in the meme

  • They show clear branding so that you can connect the dots.

If you are going for brand awareness rather than a direct conversion those types of ads can work very well.

I liked it for sure.

How can I make this better?

I hope you learned something new. Did you, though?

What would you like to read more about?
Reply to this and let me know.

Talk to you next week,
Pears!

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me

  • I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. Book a session ->

  • I also do longer-term advising. We meet weekly/biweekly and I help you hit your dev marketing goals. Reach out ->

2. Join our Slack community

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3. Bonus links to check out

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