Key Takeaways from Egghead talk: Marketing Tactics for Software Developers

How to increase your value as a developer

https://egghead.io/talks/egghead-marketing-tactics-for-software-developers

The talk in 3 sentences

• Good marketing gets important message to the right person at the right time
• Be excited! Projects/ Blogposts/ or just yourself. Share about the progress, the benefits. REPEAT. REPEAT. REPEAT.
• Improve on techniques: Learn from other developers. Why you love following them? How do you know about them? Monitor web analytics and continuously improve based on data.

Impressions

I love how Stephanie explains the differences between good marketing and bad marketing. The differentiation makes it easier for me to overcome the stereotypes about marketing (manipulation, irrelevance) and convey the idea to other friends.

Who should watch it

Developers. Testers, Designers and PMs and other working professionals can also benefit from it by thinking about how to adapt the concept/ tools to their specific context/ environment.

How the talk changed me? (Life, behaviour, thoughts, ideas)

• I will place a higher focus on analytics when creating a personal website next 2 months.
• I am the type that “Post & Ghost”. I don’t reply to comments and I am trying to reduce my time on social media. However, one thing I did was that I immediately took actions and replied to the publication editors comments for publishing some of my previous posts.
• Instead of interacting with other people on FB/ Twitter where I get side tracked easily, I will try interacting with people on Reddit — maybe ReactJS Beginners Thread?
• Marketing is about 1. getting information across 2. improving perceived value. It is worth spending time thinking about the unique value I can bring (testing + dev) and how to strengthen + market this combo to bring more values

My top 3 quotes

• Good marketing has a value proposition. A value proposition is essentially a statement that says, “This is who I am. This is what I offer. This is what you can expect from me and this is how you will benefit.”
• Part of the marketing game, is getting data, getting insights, trying to understand what may have gone wrong. Then experimenting with new approaches, isolating one new thing to work on next time (wow! This approach is exactly like debugging!)
• Because marketing is all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time, you have to repeat yourself and you have to do it often. It doesn’t mean spam everyone on your timeline. It does mean resurface things that you’ve done in the past that are still valuable.

Note

• The format of this post is adapted from Shawn’s reading template
• Another excellent post from Shawn on marketing that I will do a deep dive some other time
• Cory House’s talk on Becoming an Outlier: Hack your Image (aka marketing) is also an important element in becoming an outlier
• Keep a brag document to market success internally — easier to get pay raise