The Dispatch

September 3, 2024 | Edition #4

Argon Labs is a specialized technical and developer marketing agency that helps developer-focused startups to scaleups build out their content strategy and helps them establish domain authority and presence in their industry.

You can find out more about us on our website. If you like this, share it with your friends, or if you received it from your network, you can subscribe here and get it from us directly.

Welcome to the latest edition of the Dispatch, where we provide you with the latest musings on technical marketing and developer experience/relations to help educate and inform you on building the best content strategy for your team and organization.

Today, we'll be answering a question we get a lot, especially for those from earlier-stage companies - where to publish their content when you're starting out and the pros/cons around it.

When you have no brand awareness, presence, or domain authority it can be tricky to figure out if you should publish on your company website, or other well-known third-party platforms.

In this piece, we're going to be covering our suggested approach so you can start accelerating your growth and brand.

Time to dive in.

But first, here are a few things that caught our eye over the past month.

What Caught Our Eye

​How to Sell Developer Tools - interesting piece that highlights ways you can sell tools such as offering free trials, engaging dev communities, how to build an effective sales team, and working with usage-based pricing models.

​Developer marketing that actually works (according to devs) - we love this because it is feedback and suggestions directly from the horse's mouth. What better way to learn from the mistakes of others than this!

​How do I hire a developer advocate - great article from the guys at Amplified Partners on how to think about hiring a Developer Advocate, the different types, the questions to ask, the expectations, and the how to implement it in your company.

​A Technical Founder's Guide to Closing more Sales - neat summary on how to help more technical founders think about closing sales. This hit hard for us because we empathize on the challenges faced when engineers and developers become founders themselves.

Where Should We Publish Our Content?

You're an early-stage founder and you have a dilemma.

Should I post on my website or should I post our content on other platforms?

The short answer is actually both.

Let us explain.

When you're starting out, there's very little branding on the company. In fact, most people don't even know you exist (yet).

Search engines like Google are also not yet aware of who you are, so they can't index your content and make it discoverable.

So where do you start?

The ultimate goal is to direct your audience to your website. This is where domain authority is created and other sites begin to backlink to you, but this takes time and patience.

At the beginning, you'll need to find other alternatives and pathways to showcase your content and ideas.

This is where third-party platforms are incredibly useful.

Platforms like Medium, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and many other forums and publications can help.

Here are a few ways you can get started:

1. If you have long-form content, you should publish it on the company website, but also on Medium (or other worthy publications) under your company logo or even the founder's personal brand - Medium allows you to import stories. On the Medium side, provide a backlink to your website so they can learn more if they're interested.
2. If you have any social accounts (which you should definitely get), you can publish a teaser of your content using a strong hook and some key highlights and then link out to your website for the full piece. Some platforms like LinkedIn want to keep you on for as long as possible, so you can circumvent this by posting the links in the comments section.
3. Forums like Reddit and even online communities on Slack and Discord are good ways to get discovered. Instead of directly selling your product/service, you can provide help by answering questions on topics within your space i.e. RAG, Blockchain/Web3, LLMs, etc. In your answer, you can provide external links to pieces you've written.
4. Finally, once they do land on your website, find ways to collect their email addresses. The best method is through a lead magnet and/or newsletter. If they like what they see, they'll subscribe. This is a great way to 'own' your audience. Third-party platforms help bring in your initial audience, but they are rented. Owning your audience allows you to reach out directly to gauge feedback, provide updates, etc.

Ultimately what all the above does is increase your visibility and discoverability.

The more you engage with your followers on social media and communities, and the more value-added content you can produce consistently, the quicker others will be able to find you and even reference your content - this is where your domain authority is established.

Remember that when selling (especially to a technical audience like developers), your job is not to promote anything. It's to help solve their problems.

It's a crowded world out there and good content marketing is severely underrated when done right.

Stay tuned for our next edition, where we'll discuss what are some key topics you can write about to get attention and traction in building your brand with your audience.

Post of the Month

Developer Insights (Beta)

As part of our ongoing progress to become more data-driven with our services, we're developing a tool to help us (and you too!) understand your developer communities and customers.

We're currently working on an internal tool (for now) that allows us to identify trends and insights.

We do this through a combination of social monitoring across a number of platforms i.e. Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Github as well as publications like Medium and even online communities such as Slack and Discord.

The biggest problem we've seen is that building products for developers can be challenging - plenty of options to choose from, not offering practical value to solve their problems, don't like being sold to, hard to find signals on what they're interested in, etc.

So far, we've been able to identify leading conversations and trends on topics that have enabled to us strategize on content creation and even influenced product roadmap decisions for some of our partners.

We are currently doing a trial run and looking for some key feedback on thoughts and suggestions.

If you're interested in learning more, please reply to this email or simply email me directly at barry [at] argonlabs [dot] xyz.