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…
I’ve been a blogger now for more than seven years. And I have to say, it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand the true nature of the blog post title. My hope today is that you may learn from my folly. There Are Actually (At Least) Three Flavors of Blog Post Title If…
SEO, SEO for techies, techies SEO, SEO in technical blogs, SEO in technical blogs not marketing, techie, techies, SEO… Oh, hi! I didn’t see you there. I was just stuffing this post with keywords in the first paragraph in order to trick Google into ranking this page for the term “SEO for techies.” Or really,…
Hit Subscribe is a content agency, and a growing one at that. Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be a post about how great we think we are, which I’ve advised you not to write in the past. Our growth matters in this context because it’s made me realize that there is something of an…
Because I have some reach in the tech community and blogging is my thing, I find that people reach out to me somewhat regularly. This outreach takes all forms, but of particular interest today is people hoping that I’ll share some post they wrote. Almost invariably, here’s how this goes. An ambitious soul decides that…
Here at Hit Subscribe, our mission involves helping techies and tech companies. We’re techies, our customers are tech companies, and their customers are techies. This means that everyone involved has a strong appreciation for data and empirical concerns. And because of this, our customers disproportionately want to talk to us about blogging ROI. How do…