The secrets of content creation for DevRels

Jeremy Morgan: So my name is Jeremy Morgan, and I help engineers get better at their job. It's my mission. It's my why. It's the thing that I'm super passionate about. And today, I'm gonna show you how to capture your audience's attention, how to teach them something new, and inspire them to talk about you so that they'll come back.

Now who am I? I'm a senior developer evangelist for Pluralsight, and that's one of the leading tech skills development platforms on the Internet. We help engineers get better at their jobs. And so I've been leading our DevRel efforts here for about two years, and I do things like create articles, create YouTube videos, presentations, all kinds of fun stuff. Our team just got way bigger.

There's a bunch of us doing it, it's really exciting. Now before that, I was a developer, engineer, architect, all kinds of stuff for nearly twenty years. So I've been in the trenches and I've seen some stuff. And today I create the bridge between developers and marketing. So developers are our customers.

They're our viewers. And what I'm doing is just kind of bridging that, you know, getting like a bridge between developers and marketing. Think it's probably the best way to describe it. So there's a ton of advice out there for content marketing, and I've consumed a lot of it, books, videos, courses, all kinds of stuff. But when it comes to developers, the rules don't really apply.

Developers hate sales pitches. They hate go to market strategies. Most of them actually despise marketing and everything it's about. And personally, I think that's very unfair. I love marketing.

It absolutely has its value, but many developers don't see it that way. So it's one of the things that you have to keep in mind when you're speaking to developers. You can't follow the standard rules of marketing, with them. Developers only care about solving problems. So they'll find you when they have a problem, period.

Whatever product you're putting in front of them, it has to solve a problem or they consider it a waste of time. So the very first question you need to ask when you're creating your content is what problem am I trying to solve? What am I trying to do to help this developer that's coming to me, like, first and foremost? Now in the book Hooked by Nir Yal, he talks about the hook model, and I've got it up here. Now this is how you get people to build a habit out of consuming your content, and they follow the cycle of events.

So there's a trigger that's like the headline or the commercial or the video that gets their attention. Then there's the action, which is actually them reading your article, watching your video, going to your presentation. Then there's the reward. And the reward is is your responsibility, and that's what they get in return for the investment, which is the next part of their time. So what this is is a cycle.

And this cycle, as people go through, you know, they get triggers, they find you, they come and watch your talk, for instance, they get a reward, and they're like, I really enjoyed this talk. They did a great job. And so then the the investment part of it is they feel like, well, I didn't waste my time going to this talk. This was this was valuable to me. And so what that does is it starts that cycle all over again.

So the next time you send them a trigger, they're going to remember you, they're going to know you, and they're going to keep going back and forth. It's kind of a habit. So what you can do is with the trigger, look for ways to grab their attention. And we're gonna talk about this a little bit with with headlines and cover photos. Look for ways to make the action more easy to do.

So what I mean by that is it shouldn't take much effort. They should be able to go and watch your video. They should be able to read your article. They should be able to go your talk. The easier it is to do, the more likely they are to do it.

And then the reward. This is where you should put the most of your efforts. This is where you wanna make it the best it can be. Make that reward, that thing that you're giving the people coming to your presentations, make it the best it can be. And the investment is make sure it's worth it.

Make sure it's worth somebody sitting down for an hour to listen to your talk or fifteen minutes in this case. Make sure it's worth them taking time out of their day to read your articles, read your tutorials, all of that. So the first step you need to think about is that trigger, capturing attention. How do you do this? With a great headline.

And headlines are your way of standing out. They're your way of getting noticed. I don't have to tell anybody here how hard that is to get noticed in the sea of content out there. But let's talk about what makes a headline great, and let's talk about what it makes what makes a headline great for developers specifically. And what I'll do is I'll talk about some of the things that I've learned in the last two years.

Avoid clickbait strategies. We don't care what works for BuzzFeed or the New York Times or any of those things because you're talking to developers. It's entirely different and most of those formulas don't really work. And you'll wanna be specific. And I can't emphasize this one enough.

Be specific. Describe exactly what the article, video, talk, whatever you're presenting, make sure it's very specific and it tells people exactly what to expect. Like in this case, there's there's no question here what the person can expect from this article. And another good thing I've learned is using contrast. People love contrast.

Think about things like Angular versus React. You know, comparing one thing to another, full stack versus mean stack developer. You know, what are the differences? People love contrast. And surprise them.

Give them the unexpected. And here you can be a little less specific if you're doing it. You can do something like why scalability doesn't grow on virtual machines. People are expecting, you know, why money doesn't grow on trees and they hear that and it's it's a surprise. It makes that headline pop out like, that's interesting.

And here's a few more headline tips. Build on known associations. So something like why maintaining your React app is like lawn care. So most of us know a little something about lawn care. And if you hang your ideas on that, it it makes it more familiar.

It makes it more approachable for people to to read. And then there's using your active voice. So if you say something like how an edge computing application was built that sped up our VR, blah blah blah blah blah, people will tune away from that. But if it's something like speeding up your VR applications with edge computing, there you go. It's simple.

It's less words, and it's that active voice And enhance the mystery. So you could do something like why I hate Rust, and that's going to get people's attention. There was a talk in that in the last one about getting on Hacker News. You know, that's something that would probably get you tons of clicks on Hacker News just from that mystery. People would say, why why would somebody hate Rust?

You know? And then putting the name of the tech in the title. This is really important. No matter what you're doing, developers will scan through headlines. They scan through talks.

If it doesn't apply to them, they don't really care. So if you do something like, how to do mobile development, they're not going to care unless you specify exactly, you know, we're talking about Swift or we're talking about it's about whatever. So let's look at some bad headlines and good headlines. This is this is what I would call a bad headline. I published my React app and you won't believe what happened next.

You know? Once again, we're going into that clickbait territory. How to build a mobile app? Too abstract. How an edge computing application was built that sped up our VR.

Too many words, too passive, makes the dog sad. Now here's a great headline. How a unit test today kept the bugs away. So we're putting that twist on a on a saying, but we're talking about unit tests. People know basically what this this article or this talk would be about.

Or building your first mobile app with Flutter. It's pretty clear that this is a beginner article talking about Flutter and how you can get started with Flutter. It's very clear. Extending functional components in React JS. Once again, we're very specific.

We're we're very leaned in and React JS developers who have never touched this component will know exactly what they're getting with this headline. Why we replaced all our Rust apps with Go? So here we're just surprising people. We're giving them something unexpected that kind of triggers the memory and gets more clicks. So every time you write a headline, write 10 of them.

This is something that I've done for a while. You write 10 of them. Some of them will be great. Some of them will be junk. Just write 10 of them.

And that what what that does is that pushes your creativity. You'll throw out most of them. Just pick one. And that's all you have to do. And I found that by writing these out, sometimes the first or second headline is the one that I wanted all along and it doesn't matter.

But sometimes number eight or nine ends up being a great headline. So they clicked it. Now what? Right? You wrote the perfect headline.

You're on the front page of hacker news or Reddit. Now what do you do? Now we'll talk about creating the content, and this goes for articles, videos, presentations, any type of content that you're putting out there. What problem are you trying to solve? Once again, you need to solve a problem for the developer.

Maybe their problem is they don't know what Rust is and they want to know more about it. Pretty abstract, but it's fine. It's a problem. Maybe they wanna know what the specific error is that they're getting in their Lambda function and how to fix it. Very specific, but both of those solve a problem.

So this is the first question you should ask. And where can you find these problems? Feedback from your customers, Twitter, social media, just basically what questions are coming up all the time about your technology. What things are coming up, all the time that seem to be, you know, problems that people are having. That's where you would wanna start.

What problems are you having with your product? And here's another thing that I always ask myself when I'm creating something. What's in it for me? What will the developer get from coming to my presentation? You need to create that answer before you even begin.

So one of the things I like to do is create a set of takeaways for this. You build three to five takeaways for what your presentation will give them. The easiest way is to say, after watching this, you will know how to blank. So I gave three takeaways in the beginning of this talk because this is how I operate with content. Make it specific and geared towards their needs.

And I'll give you an example. Here's our problem. So what problem were we trying to solve? I don't know anything about React components. So this is the developer saying this to you.

So they might ask, what's a React component? How do I make one? Or when should I use them? These are all mysteries that you're going to solve with these takeaways. So as you're building your article, you build a set of takeaways.

You say, after reading this article, you'll understand what a React component is. You'll know how to create your first React component. Maybe you'll have a little tutorial in there for creating one. And then you'll know when you should create a React component, when to use it, when to not use it. There's your three takeaways.

That right there is a structure for the entire article that you can hang everything else on. And so with these takeaways, we have these pain points here. And all you're doing is you're taking those pain points, you're turning them into pleasure points. Right? These are problems.

These are needs. These are desires that the developers have, and you're fulfilling them with your content. And if you look at this, this is how I would structure this article. Understand what a React component is. That's my first takeaway.

So I would describe what's a component. How does it work? Why does it matter? That that one's always important to put in there. Why does it matter?

Why should you care about this? And then kind of go on from there and make sure that every single thing points to one of those takeaways. If it doesn't point to the takeaway, throw it out. Tell them what you're gonna tell them. Tell them.

Tell them what you told them. Right? High school English class. This is another good content rule to follow. And here's another really good structure that I like to look for.

And I got this from watching Apple speeches years and years like we all have. You introduce the villain, which is the problem that we identified. Then you elaborate those pain points then you provide a solution to those pain points. And you can do this with a talk, with a YouTube video, with an article, all of this stuff doesn't matter. And then at the end, describe the beautiful future ahead.

Now that you look at the structure, the next time you watch one of those old, like the iPhone launch or the iPad launch or any of those, you'll notice this structure is present in there and there's a reason for that. And speaking of presentations, the demos, the last part I'll touch on, always have a demo. So if you're doing anything with software, anything with tech, don't just have a set of slides like this talk that I'm giving right now. Like, if I were talking about React, I would definitely open up a console here and start coding in React. Always have a demo.

Always have something that you can show people that they will be interested in. Practice it five times at a minimum and then prepare for failure. So in this picture here, I'm giving a presentation about Blazor back when it was brand new. It was a really kind of a shaky technology. I'd practiced it over and over and over and over.

When I got up there on stage and started to run things, everything broke and fell apart. I had a virtual machine that was on that same computer, everything configured, everything installed just in case that happened and I had to pop open that virtual machine, start writing my code in there and doing that. Having a preconfigured virtual machine or even a second laptop is good preparation. So going back to that hook model, you can see that we're trying to build a good trigger. We're trying to make it easy for them to get to our content.

We're trying to give them a great reward, make it worth their investment so that they will come back and repeat this cycle again. Alright. And I think I'm right right about with a minute left. So I work for Pluralsight, as I said, one of the biggest IT workforce development companies in the world. It's really fun.

We're having a lot of fun. We're expanding our developer relations team. We are looking for a director of developer relations. Maybe that's you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter.

I've had I have my contact info here or go to pluralsight.com/careers if you are interested in joining us. And I will be hanging out in the Discord also after this to kind of cover that. And thank you all for for attending.