Forem: leo 👨🏻‍💻

From 0 to 100 Followers on Twitter. How I Grew My Developer Account 🥳

leo 👨🏻‍💻 — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:01:04 +0000

Content is king 👑

There's no escaping it, and if there is one final outtake to this whole post, it's probably this one - you should produce content.

Any form and format. I don't think it matters. What I do think matters is that when you do create something, you do it out of wisdom, not hard work. I will explain that in a minute.

First, let me present you with some context.

If you don't know me, which is quite likely, I'm Leo, a guy sharing his journey on becoming a master coder 🌈

It all began a year ago when I started learning HTML, CSS, and everything else. I can share details on the path I took and the resources I'm using to learn everyday if any of you wants it. But that's for some other time.

As I started to dive deeper into tech, I realized I needed some sort of authority on social media.

After all, there's no better brand than your name.

And the best place to start would be good old Twitter.

Building a following 🦺

My goals, clear as paper, were:

💅🏻 Setup a pretty account.
🕺🏻 Become huge somehow.
👔 Get loads of job offers.

Seems easy, heh.

The new account would be for my developer life. I would follow tech topics, cool engineers, and some founders.

After setting it up, I had something like this:

That's how it looks right now. But I change it all the time, lol.

Anyway, I believe I grew to 100 followers in about a month. And there's no harder time to grow when you have no social proof or backup of who you are online.

For example, if you receive a notification that someone followed you, and you go check the person out and they have 1522 followers, you might feel incline to follow them back.

It happens because they have social proof of some sort. In this case, its numbers. But if the person has 4 followers? Yeah, not so much strength on hitting that following back button.

So my primary objective was growing my social proof aka my following.

And how did I achieve those 100 followers?

Milking the shit out of a blog post I created 😈 😈

Milking the traction 🐮

I don't understand organic growth on Twitter, and I wouldn't leave it for luck.

So after brainstorming a bit, I decided I would write an article, but not a technical one. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it.

I would write one of those "Top Resources You Should Know" lists you see everywhere. But mine would have actual great resources because I'm a favoriting/bookmarking god. I had tons of it.

Where to post it?

Well, I would spam on anywhere I could.

I found a forum called DEV (hi) that had some interesting engagement. It seemed to have a good rotation of "trending" posts, and so I created an account on it. I would also post on my blog, although I knew it would get me zero views.

The content

I finished writing the article in about 50 minutes.

I think I organized a well-constructed clickbait with a nice image, and because of that, it got #1 of the week on the same day and #2 of the month a while later.

Of course, I did my research. I used the most populated tags on the forum and read a few trending posts to catch the gist of it.

So I made a post that got 1k likes. Yay. Where are my followers? 💰

This is where you work wiser and not harder.

The post itself gave me zero followers. The important catch here is that I received 200 followers on DEV. I guess it lacked that sort of content and some people just dropped a click on the follow button.

Your profile in there is irrelevant, people don't care about it. But here lied the trick: when I followed them back, the platform allowed us to chat privately 🤾🏻

Bingo. I could harass people. I mean chat.

And so I did. 200 times.

I guess it was hard work... well whatever.

I was impressed by the number of replies I got.

Yes, I'm not proud of copy and pasting a bunch of messages, but I had no real idea if I would even get a single reply, so I just went with it.

I think it was about 60% of respondents, with is NUTS. My theory is that no one uses DM here, so when that new blue icon pops up, they get curious and open up.

I probably spent two hours sending DMs to people and telling them to follow me on Twitter.

I grew to 100 followers on the same day. Easy.

But that wasn't enough. The seat was still warm and I felt I could capitalize some more while I could. So I built a Newsletter to see how many I could convert on that riding wave.

A Newsletter 🍬

I built it using Next.js and Mailchimp, and I plan on writing about how I did it soon. You can check the final product here.

It probably took me a solid week to build, buy a domain, and deploy. I used the numbers I got from the post to boost social proof on the Newsletter, even tho I had none.

I then got back to those DM's and also reached out to some new followers I got, still results from that post. I invited everyone to subscribe to this new thing.

Oh, my poor test subjects 🧑🏻‍⚕️

After reaching out to those people, I got 45 subscribers. Which is not an amazing number by any means - but so isn't 100 followers on Twitter.

But again, context.

I knew no one in the tech field and had a brand new account.
That's some pretty solid results if you ask me.

I also published the Newsletter on Product Hunt, but it flopped. I got 1 upvote, and it was from my cousin. Obviously. You need a proper plan to launch it on PH, which I didn't.

And that's about it.

I had a lot of fun chatting on the DMs with everyone here on DEV.

I hope you got any useful knowledge out of this gigantic mess. If you did, maybe you should... follow me on Twitter?

Don't forget, everyone: Content is king.

Why do you think I even wrote this?

By Popular Demand, Bubblegum.dev 🍬 is Live. Glycerin Levels Going Up.

leo 👨🏻‍💻 — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 15:01:29 +0000

Click here if you drink water ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Click here if you breathe air ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Click here if you eat stuff ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Hi.

After a silly resources post got 1000+ reactions, we knew what was about to happen.

✨ Another Newsletter Made ✨

Yep. And we did it proudly. After all, who doesn't like shiny, new stuff 💎?

So Bubblegum.dev was created. This one is all about those sweet, sweet hidden gems. The ones you were craving for and didn't even know.
The wow, I need it kind.

Maybe it's useful 🏆
Maybe it's pretty ☀️
Maybe it's fun 🥳
Maybe it's the best newsletter ever created and the one that will forever be remembered on the heart of over half a million talented developers

Maybe it's all of it. We don't follow a strict rule.

We find something and we use the hell out of it. If we're addicted and can't stop using, we shout it out. It's that simple.

With that being said - give us your email here 🔫 🔫 🔫

We're also live on Product Hunt. We would appreciate a thumbs up there :)

Click here if you know how to click here ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

My favorite resources being a freelancer as a side hustle 💎

leo 👨🏻‍💻 — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 13:01:20 +0000

I've read tons of resources collections.

So have you, I imagine.

This is why I am writing this, in the hopes it can actually help you with creating new quality stuff, quicker.

Because ‘better’ will always be a losing game for your brand.

You just need to be wiser while building, making more 💵 , and spending less ⏳ on it as a consequence.

So no bullshit here 💩.

✨ Let's go straight to the point ✨

If you like any of this, react with 💕 and I will make more

📦 Vercel

I can't recommend this enough. I also use Netlify, but changed to Vercel because the UI is slicker. It's free, you host your project in a few clicks, and it also gives you an SSL certificate, so you won't have the site not secured tag.

or Tiiny.host if you're prototyping. No registration, just drag the folder and it gives you a link. Up for 3 days and then it's gone.

🧪 Hoverify

This is paid but worth it. Cheaper than other ones ($18) and amazing. I use the color picker and grid system all the time when building something or just scrolling through a website, to see how the divs are positioned.

🎀 Csslayout.io

Never seen this one on other collections. Super good and fast code snippets for making layouts, navs, headers, etc. Shout-out to fellow Dev member phuocng who made this.

🔑 NiceVeryNice

This site itself is a compilation of really good resources. What I use the most is their Components part, where I often go to when looking for reference. Need to build a hero? Go there and check hero examples. I use it with Hoverify.

🧲 Paatern.css

This is something I only superficially used but I like it. Background and background-image patterns to add complexity to your designs.

🧷 Tabler Icons

Of all the thousands of icon provider websites, this is my favorite. It's all SVG, color, size and thickness customizable.

🔋 Tailwind CSS

Okay, this one is just because I love it. You probably already know it. Super easy building stuff with Tailwind. Its a utility-first, mobile-first CSS framework that's been ranking up on users recently. I share the hype.

🔮 Design Systems Repo

A project repo that counts with a giant list of design systems, style guides, and pattern libraries. Sometimes I just scroll here to see if I want to try something out of my comfort zone.

🎁 Treact

This is GOLD. I built a fully responsive, beautiful React website with it, so I know its good. He also uses Tailwind.

🚒 Tailblocks

By this point, you know I like Tailwind. I built a responsive personal portfolio in one hour with Tailblocks hosting it in Vercel. Very well structured and easy to use.

🎣 Open

Was a bit reluctant to put this one here, because it costs $49 and I never bought it. But I like the visuals and a friend of mine used it, so here it is.

⚾️ Web.dev

Always use this when finishing a website. It scores your SEO, accessibility, how fast it is, etc. Must check it out if you already didn't.

🎨 Projector

I think this one is fairly new. I use this to create quick presentations for my clients. You don't have to, but it feels nice not to just send your client their website link.

🧸 Public APIs

An amazing list of public APIs for using. This is huge and it's amazing how many different types of APIs there is to experiment with.