Part 1: Intro
Why Hacker News?
- Large audience
- Broadly accepts user submissions
Why Hacker News?
- Technically sophisticated audience
- Interested in paying for useful products
Why Hacker News?
- Feeder for other blogs and news sites
Why Hacker News?
- Improves SEO to your domain
Why this course?
- Hacker News is unique from other social networks
- Distinctive culture and etiquette
- Atypical submission rules and ranking algorithm
Why this course?
- Hacker News provides limited opportunities to learn
- You either hit the front page or completely flop
Why listen to me?
- I’ve had 18 posts hit the front page of HN in the past 3 years
- Five reached #1
- 11 in the last 12 months
Why listen to me?
- One post received 300k readers in a week
- 500k visitors by end of the year
Why listen to me?
- My post about TinyPilot jumpstarted my business
Who should take this course?
- Tech bloggers
- Startup founders and employees
- Hacker News enthusiasts
Overview
- Understand Hacker News
- Choose Winning Topics
- Find a Plan B
- Elevate Your Writing
- Prepare Your Site for Success
- Submission Day
- My Process: From Start to Finish
Understand Hacker News
- Hacker News culture and etiquette
- Respecting the rules
- What makes posts succeed?
Choose Winning Topics
- Case studies of successful posts
- Estimating audience size
- Minimizing required background knowledge
Find a Plan B
- Finding backup channels
- reddit, Twitter, Google Search
- Learning from other successes
Elevate Your Writing
- Telling it like a story
- Investing in quality
- Avoiding common mistakes
Submission Day
- Presenting your article effectively
- Participating in discussion
- If at first you don’t succeed…
My Process: From Start to Finish
- My tools for writing
- My writing habit
- My editing process
