What can you do besides online events?
Tags: devrel
Published: 2020-04-06 13:57:21

---
title: What can you do besides online events?
published: true
date: 2020-03-31 22:10:06 UTC
tags: DevRel, DeveloperRelations
canonical_url: https://maxkatz.org/2020/03/31/what-can-you-do-besides-online-events/
description: How to start publishing content and creating videos 
---

With most of the world in lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19), most organizations switched to running online events. IBM Developer SF team has been running [online events](http://crowdcast.io/ibmdeveloper) for almost two years so the switch to online-only was simple for us. I shared before how [online events allow you to scale](https://dev.to/maxkatz/how-to-scale-developer-relations-with-online-meetups-4216).

Not everyone can or wants to run online events. You might be in a place where internet connection doesn’t permit to produce live high-quality events. You simply might not be comfortable doing live events. And that’s fine. The good news – there are other things you can do.

## Content

This is a good time to publish that article or blog post that you always wanted to publish but didn’t have time. Digital content (articles, blog posts, tutorials, how-to’s, etc) is a superb way to reach developers anywhere in the world. Good quality content can provide value for a long time.

Consider writing a step-by-step tutorial which shows how to solve a particular problem you recently solved. If you are browsing Stack Overflow or any other community web site and find an unanswered question you can write a blog post answering the question. Then go back to Stack Overflow answer the question there and reference your blog post. I shared more content ideas in my [a year of blogging every week](https://dev.to/maxkatz/a-year-of-blogging-every-week-187j) post. If you are really out of ideas, consider [borrowing brilliance](https://dev.to/maxkatz/borrowing-brilliance-or-one-quick-way-to-come-up-with-content-ideas-9dl) from other folks.

You could also consider writing a series of tutorials or articles, such as introduction, beyond the basics and advanced topics.

You can also republish or syndicate the content you publish on to different platforms. For example, [Dev.to](http://dev.to), is a great and welcoming developer community. Dev.to makes it easy to pull content from your blog and republish it on their platform (keeping canonical link pointing to your original content).

![](https://katzmax.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/content-creates-content-6a.png?w=1024)<figcaption>Content creates content flow</figcaption>

One of my favorite [how content creates content](https://dev.to/ibmdeveloper/how-content-creates-content-3edj) blog posts shows how to syndicate content and share content on social media.

## Video

If running live online events is not an option, consider recording videos and then uploading them to your YouTube channel. A YouTube video is easily embeddable which makes is a great content for a blog post. With YouTube being the [2nd largest search engine](https://www.walkersands.com/are-you-taking-advantage-of-the-2nd-largest-search-engine-in-the-world/), videos are a superb way to reach developers anywhere and anytime. A good-quality video can deliver value for a long time.

My favorite type of video is short, between 10-20 minutes, and usually shows step-by-step how to build, code or solve a problem. When 20 minutes is not enough, consider recording a series of videos. General overview videos are also excellent. For example, if a service has a dashboard, you can record a video which shows the various views/components of a dashboard.

Now, you don’t have to produce studio-quality videos. My advice is to start with existing recording software you have on your computer. For example, on macOS you can use QuickTime. I’d rehearse a few times and try recording. Don’t worry if you make mistakes – that makes you human (and humans make mistakes). As long as you can recover, continue recording. If you record a 15-minute video – that’s all it takes which is very fast. In fact, it’s probably significantly faster than writing a similar tutorial.

## Getting started

If you are still struggling to get started, I’d advise to set a time every day (or week) for writing. It’s easy to push writing to be the least important priority “…I’ll do it later when I have time”. And then say the same thing happens next time. Producing a high-quality tutorial or a video is as important as running an in-person event or going to a conference. In my opinion, such content should get high priority (if not the highest) as it allows to scale, it’s available to anyone and anywhere. It can bring value to developers anywhere for a long time.

In addition to allocating time to write, I’d also encourage to set a publish schedule. For example, commit to publishing once a week or twice a month. The frequency you start with is not as important as keeping the commitment and publishing on regular bases.

I hope this blog post will help you start creating interesting content.