Role
Content Strategist
Hashnode
Content strategy and marketing for a developer blogging platform.
Period
2021 – 2022 (8 months)
Location
Bangalore, India (remote)
Skills
marketing, SEO, community building
Company website
Sample work
The company
Hashnode is a blogging platform for writers in the tech industry. It was created as an alternative to platforms like Medium that were increasingly restricting the reach of independent creators, and didn’t provide the kinds of features that developers needed to showcase their work.
My work
In 2021 I served as the company’s first content strategist, eventually leading the marketing team that was responsible for all copywriting, SEO, social media, and community building efforts. I worked closely with the co-founders to develop a style, voice, and content strategy to help the company grow its user base and establish itself as the go-to platform for developer blogging.
Here are some of the projects I worked on at Hashnode:
Technical writing bootcamp
While cultivating the platform’s developer community, it was important to me to establish an ethos of freely sharing knowledge to help people succeed.
To that end, I organized and hosted a free two-week writing workshop series called The Art and Business of Technical Writing, featuring top content creators in the tech industry. I wrote all marketing materials for the event, including the landing page as well as the automated email marketing sequence that accompanied the series. I also landed three paid sponsorships for the bootcamp from well-respected companies in the industry.
The goal was to get at least 1,000 users to sign up for the event. In the end we had almost 3,000 signups! The email marketing campaign had an average open rate above 60%. The bootcamp led to hundreds of new blog posts being published on the platform.
SEO content marketing
When I joined, the co-founders presented me with an ambitious challenge: We want to overtake Medium as the go-to blogging platform for software developers. To that end, I wrote copy for the Hashnode vs. Medium landing page, which became the second-highest converting page on the site after the homepage.
My creative process was driven by two factors: feedback from the community and SEO research.
Through user interviews and interactions with the community, we discovered some of the primary selling points that resonated the most with our existing users. These formed the backbone of the headlines and subheaders that I wrote.
We had found that certain keywords were drawing the majority of users to the platform—search terms like:
- free Medium alternative
- developer blogging
- dev community
- blog on a custom domain
- Hashnode vs Medium
So I worked these into the copy along the way.
Of course, social proof is crucial for a piece like this. Hashnode had worked hard to cultivate an enthusiastic community on Twitter, so we liberally peppered this page with positive tweets from well-known users on the platform.
Writing for Hashnode meant speaking to an international audience ranging from teenage hackers to enterprise industry veterans. For many users, English might be a second, third, or fourth language, making it crucial to get straight to the point with minimal flowery language, idioms, and cultural references. This economy of words forced me to be ruthless when editing, which naturally lended itself to sharp copy.
