The Results of Four Weeks of Cross-Posting to Dev.To
Four weeks ago, on March 27th I decided to give dev.to a chance and published my first article. It’s a cross-posted article which I originally posted on my blog.
After four weeks I think it’s a good time to look back if the effort is worth it and how my articles performed. After all, I want to reach as many developers as possible.
I have published eight articles by now which means that I published two articles per week on average. All of the were cross-posts from my blog. A few of those articles were published on my blog in the same week. The other articles are a few weeks older.
Post views
Let’s take a look at the overall results of all my eight articles combined. I got 5100+ post views which means my articles got about 640 post views on average in total. Every article has been read about 23 times per day.
I have two articles which both drove the majority of the post views. My best performing article drove about 2000 views and my second best about 1000 views. It means that the other 6 articles combined drove only 2000 views together. One of my articles did not even pass the 100 views mark yet. It was my first article on dev.to.
Followers
Dev.to allows readers to follow authors. My eight articles got me 1050 followers within four weeks. I have read on dev.to that they suggest authors to new users.
I assume that some of the people following followed through the suggestion feature because 1050 followers out of 5000 post views would be 21%. I don’t think that 21% of the people reading my posts hit the follow button. If it’s true, that would be fantastic!
Reactions
Readers on dev.to can react to a post with a heart, a unicorn or put the article on their reading list. All three actions combined are called reactions. My eight articles combined got 306 reactions which means every article got around 38 reactions on average.
Comments
All my article combined got 17 comments. Some of those comments were my comments as an answer to a comment from the community. Excluding my comments, I have 14 comments on my articles which means that an article got 1.75 comments on average.
Let’s take a closer look at all the published articles and the statistics in detail.
Performance by article
The following diagram shows the number of views by article sorted by publication date from left to right.
The second and my last published article were the articles with the most post views.
The following table contains all the numbers for each article including the number of views, reactions, and comments.
| Publication | Title | Views | Reactions | Comments |
| 27.03.2019 | Challenges Stepping into a New Project | 99 | 5 | 0 |
| 29.03.2019 | Starting a YouTube Channel as a Software Developer | 1028 | 81 | 4 |
| 01.04.2019 | Home Office - How Working from Home Really Is | 779 | 42 | 2 |
| 04.04.2019 | 10 Podcasts for (.NET) developers in 2019 | 298 | 9 | 1 |
| 06.04.2019 | Why I Publish My Articles on Dev.To | 444 | 44 | 3 |
| 08.04.2019 | Introduction to the Universal Windows Platform | 214 | 19 | 2 |
| 12.04.2019 | 4 Reasons Why Console Applications Are Great | 388 | 16 | 3 |
| 18.04.2019 | 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Programming | 1995 | 90 | 2 |
| Total | 5245 | 306 | 17 |
Conclusion and interpretation
I wrote an article about why I gave dev.to a chance and what my assumptions about the platform were. Now that I have some statistics of articles written myself I want to see if my assumptions were correct or not.
First of all, the 5000 post views are not that much. I receive about 8000 post views on my blog. Okay, my blog contains 60 posts, but the posts driving the most traffic are always the latest articles except a single article that drives me a lot of organic traffic through Google.
5000 post views are not bad either. I am pretty okay with the number. As a new author on Dev.to, I think I can be proud and satisfied that 5000 readers found my articles.
Now let’s talk about the impressive numbers. 306 reactions are huge. I have a 6% engagement ratio which is outstanding compared to my blog where people only react to my posts in a fraction of percentage. Okay, the only way to react to posts on my blog is by writing a comment (update: there no comment section anymore) — not a fair comparison.
Despite that, I am delighted with more than 300 reactions from those 5000 readers. It gives me a good feeling that people want to read about what I have to say.
1050 followers. What a number. When I published my first article on dev.to I could never imagine that I hit four digits within less than a month. It seems like people really like my content and want to read more from me.
It’s the number that motivates me the most to continue the journey and to think about valuable content that I can share with my readers.
I hope that some of those followers will come back and read my future articles. If my articles deliver a lot of value, I also hope that some of the readers start spreading the word about my articles by sharing them on social media. It would help me reach more readers and grow my following even further.
It’s only four weeks; I am very curious about what’s coming next. The only thing I know for sure is that I will continue to cross-post my content on dev.to. It’s a great platform, and the results speak for themselves.
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