Editorial note: I originally wrote this post on my DaedTech blog. It and the series that will follow are aimed at engineers training to be our account strategists. But there’s enough overlap that it makes sense to publish on this site as well. Today I’m going to start a blog post series that fits into…
Editorial note: I originally posted this on the DaedTech blog, but am cross-posting it here because of the audience overlap. Software engineers hang out on Twitter. I know this anecdotally and by feel because I spent most of my career as a software engineer and I’ve had a Twitter account for more than a decade. …
One of the most awkward interactions that I have on sales calls these days arises out of an apparently benign question that I ask. “How many reviewers will you have for each blog post?” Here’s what happens next, depending on the response. When the prospects answer with one or zero reviewers, the call continues without…
At the time of writing, our business publishes up to 40 blog posts per week. Managing that is no easy feat. So naturally, we throw lots of low cost labor at the problem and run around like chickens with our heads cut off. Er, wait. That’s not what we do. We do the opposite of…
My business, Hit Subscribe, provides content strategy and content. So it probably won’t shock you to learn that we frequently talk to people with the title “content manager,” and thus have a great deal of field experience when it comes to that role. Today, I’d like to leverage that experience to talk about what that…
This might be the single weirdest title I’ve ever typed. At least, it’s the weirdest one for me personally. I’ve now spent more than 20 years programming and more than 10 blogging about programming. And those blogging efforts have earned me 4 million page views on my first blog alone. And yet, here I am,…
“So obviously your authors will get to know our product before they write for our blog, I’m assuming?” If I had a dime for every time I’ve fielded this question… I’d actually only have a couple of dollars, come to think of it. But while that’s not overwhelming in magnitude or my hypothetical bank account,…
I feel for you, in a sense, if you’re reading this post with interest. That’s doubly true if you arrived here by googling something like “how to write technical blog posts.” I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have no issues with what you’re trying to do—learning to write blog posts. Good for you. I…
If you start a blog as a hobby or a personal journal, the best content for you is obviously the content you write. Express your opinions, argue your points, and tell your story. Do you. But what’s the best content for a commercial or brand blog? Well, in an ideal world, it’s content that takes…
If you’ve arrived here via Google, I can just imagine the frustration you’re feeling right now. Let me paraphrase, if I may: I just want to know what a normal, 1,500 word blog post costs, and nobody on the entire internet has a straight answer! “It depends, and could cost anywhere from $5 to $2,500”…
I spent about a decade in roles with various flavors of “software engineer” in the title. After that, I logged time as a dev manager, CIO, IT management consultant, and dev trainer/coach. I have occupied, supervised, or advised literally every role in the IT org chart. So naturally, I founded a marketing company three years…
If you have a marketing background, taking your first job in the world of developer tools has got to be one of the clearest examples of “drinking from the fire hose” imaginable. I’ve been programming for more than 20 years, and keeping up with the in-group jargon takes effort from me. For you? Yikes. My…
Here at Hit Subscribe, we help companies with content marketing, and with content marketing strategy. But, unlike a lot of agencies, we focus on a very specific niche: companies that market to software developers. This means that we live at the intersection of the software development world and the content marketing world. It also means…
About a week ago, I made me some internet. More specifically, I went to my favorite hosting platform, SiteGround, bought a domain name, and spun up a WordPress instance. This all took about 15 minutes, and when I was done, we had makemeaprogrammer.com. Let me take a screen capture of the default Lorem Ipsum thing…
A Prussian officer by the name of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once famously said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Roughly a century later, Mike Tyson would appropriate this sentiment to “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Separated by 100 years and a language, these two…