As a software developer, it is easy for me to get carried away with the development related tasks when working on a web project. As I develop one feature, I am always thinking of ways on how to improve that feature or how to integrate that feature with other tools. Then I quickly realize that my product could benefit from another feature and start working on that next great feature. Without being careful, I can find myself in a rabbit hole of development which never ends and doesn't have a clearly defined end state. To prevent that from happening, I like to plan ahead for the month what I am going to focus my efforts on. To accomplish this, I like to plan my work by creating sprints in Azure Dev Ops. This allow me to think ahead of time on what the product needs and how to gain adoption of the product.
When thinking about gaining traction, you first have to target users in your niche so that they no that they exist. Once you get in front of the users, there has to be a compelling reason for them to check out your product. Then finally once they are on your landing page, it has to be clear to them what your product does, how it is used and how it will benefit them. At the heart of providing this value to the users is content creation.
I try to balance my time evenly between development tasks and content creation tasks. There needs to be a balance between marketing and product. What's the sense in marketing a product that doesn't exist or provides no value to your customers. You may attract users initially, but they are unlikely to return to your site if the product is lousy. On the flip side, what's the point of creating the world's best product that no-one knows about. There has to be a balance between these efforts, and what words for me is splitting my sprints up between development and content. I'll have a 2 week sprint completely focused on content creation and marketing followed by a 2 week development only sprint. Using this approach this ensures that I spread out my focus to every aspect that is important to creating a great product. it also helps to keep me energized and excited about my project. Splitting things up like this makes sure that I am always working on something different and new, and gives me something to look forward to. I don't get burnt out because I am never doing anything repetitive.
Software development comes naturally to me, but marketing and content creation doesn't. I appreciate great marketing and totally appreciate it as an artform and I strive to get better at content creation and telling a story. Here are a few tools which I came across which I find really helpful in developing written and visual content.
The Hemingway app acts as a proof reader and will help organize your thoughts by highlighting content that could be worded better. Also it provides a "grade level" of your content which identifies the lowest level of education required to read your works. This is important as you want your content to be readable for a broad audience without insulting their intelligence.
It is never my intention to copy others works, yet my ideas get formulated and influenced from others works which I've read and researched. I like to run my content through plagiarism checkers. Plagiarism checkers confirm that my content is original and doesn't share too many similarities with others work.
This simple color wheel tool takes the guess work out of finding what colors go well together. Normally when developing a brand style guide, I start with a primary color that goes along with the theme of what the company is trying to accomplish. Then once, I have the primary color I use the color wheel to find secondary colors which are complimentary to my primary color.
Canva is seen as the gold standard for creating beautiful looking designs quickly. With Canva, beautiful designs can be created by anyone. Canva doesn't have the steep learning curve that photo editing tools such as Photoshop and Gimp generally require.
Wepik is very similar to Canva, but I prefer it because of one handy feature. This feature shows the colors which are used in the design that you are working with and you can quickly change those colors to match your branding.
Including imagery with written content is important to help keep users engaged with your site. As a general rule, you'll want to have an image for every 100 words of written content that you have. This increases readability and user engagement. Below are a few sites which I use to gather royalty and license free imagery
I don't use this tool very often, but it came in handy when I wanted to make a cartoon version of a picture of myself that I had. This was very easy to use - I uploaded a picture and the tool converted the image to a cartoon for me. It also had a few other filters available to allow you to make quick adjustments to pictures that you have.
Having screenshots of your website when creating marketing materials can come in handy. These screenshots describe what your website does and how to use the site. Shotsnapp is a simple to use tool which generates an image of a device (laptop/tablet/phone) with your content displayed on it.