[Case Study] Blogging as a Developer Relations Strategy
Tags: devrel, showdev, beginners
Published: 2019-11-29 15:31:05

In this video, I discuss how Microsoft Azure, PluralSight, and Dev.to do an excellent job at using blogging on dev.to as a Developer Relations strategy:

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Transcript:

Hi! Welcome back to my channel.

In today's video, I want to highlight three companies that I think do an amazing job at using blogging as a DevRel strategy. 

Now, most tech companies have their own engineering blogs - that is definitely one way of using blogging as a DevRel strategy - to have your own engineering blog. And I think if you are a tech company, that can become the hub of your content for your community.

But there is something to be said about meeting the readers where they are. So along with having your own company blog, I think it's also important to have a cross-posting strategy. And in my research, the current best place to cross-post developer content is Dev.to. So in today's video, I particularly want to highlight three companies that do a good job at using Dev.to - as a blogging platform. 

The first company I want to highlight is Microsoft Azure. And the
reason I love their blog posts on Dev.to is that it gives me the feeling that the developer advocates who are working on this content are actual members of the Dev.to community. And because they are very active members of the Dev.to community, they are kind of attuned to what the
community needs are and then they create content to serve that need. And my favorite part about their content is that it is not market-y. It's more like, "Oh, you have this problem -- let me help you out in any way I can irrespective of whether you can use our product to solve that problem." For example, one of my favorite blog posts of all time is this [Kubernetes tutorial](https://dev.to/azure/learn-kubernetes-2idd) by Chris Noring. He has this amazing series where he breaks down the basics
of Kubernetes and he talks about this product only when it is contextually-relevant but the overall blog series is extremely helpful to any person who wants to learn more about Kubernetes.

Their developer advocacy team does a fantastic job of understanding what
their users need and then helping the users achieve their goals and if they happen to use the product, that's awesome. Which, in my opinion, is the best way to do developer relations -- is find out what your users need help them out and just build a good relationship and gain their
trust so that when they look for a solution, your product is something that comes to their mind first. 

Another company on Dev.to that follows the same principle is PluralSight. PluralSight is a technology skills-building platform - that is the platform you go to when you want to learn new technological skills to further your career. And their blog posts on Dev.to reflect their brand
very well. If you look at the top posts by the team, they are very in-tune with what their user-base needs. Like the questions that the user-base would have and they proactively provide the information that the users would look for, again thereby building trust and building authentic connections through helping the users achieve their goals. 

Another very important thing that I think both the companies to well -- is consistency. If you look at the posting schedules of both these companies on Dev.to, you can see that they have a pretty regular schedule of posting. So that they train their audience to expect useful content at least once a week or once every two weeks. This is again part of building trust with your audience, just showing up for your audience on a regular basis -- sends the signal that you are invested in this community and you
want to develop a long-term relationship with your community and it's not just "write one blog post and then disappear for months". 

And the final company that I want to talk about who I think uses Dev.to really well is Dev.to. Dev.to is one of my favorite open-source platforms and the team behind the platform is also very attuned to their community because they are part of the community. If you see the posts by the team members of Dev.to - it is always about providing value. They are very transparent about how they are operating the business. They
are very human in their approach in the sense they ask questions, they ask for feedback, they ask for help. They post questions that people can respond to so that it can drive engagement and it provides a comfortable, low-barrier entry point for new members to start engaging with the community. At least from a user's perspective, I think they do a fantastic job of just being good people and being good empathetic humans and it shows in everything that they do. Which goes back to building trust with your communities and being the platform of choice for developers. 

So those were my three favorite companies that I think do an excellent job of using blogging as a DevRel strategy. And the common aspect across the three companies is the consistency and adding value for the community. But consistently creating valuable blog posts can get
exhausting if you don't have a process. And that's what I want to start
exploring in the next video. 

So in the next video, I will share my four-drafts method to write a technical blog post. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you will join me for the next one. I'll see you then. Bye!