How to promote your Github project

For JavaScript projects, but still can be applied to other things

Alright, you’ve spent a lot of time building cool and useful tool or a book on Github. The next step is to make the entire world to hear about it and give some feedback.

Here is the trick about publishing your work: your project can be crazy awesome or deadly boring and, honestly, useless for other people, but, neither first or second happens if no one has ever seen your project.

What is important to keep in mind, you are not asking people for “stars”, just make sure people could see your project and let them decide to appreciate your work, ignore or put ‘dislike’.

How can you know it will work

My recent projects got 3k and 4k stars (https://github.com/Bogdan-Lyashenko) and both of them appeared in the top of ‘Github trending’, so hopefully, it’s not a pure luck and the instructions in this article will help you as well. But before you started, you should know one thing: for sure, promote your project is much easier if you are already ‘popular online’ and, even if a project is not that revolutionary awesome it still can go well. At the same time, if you have 3 followers, and they are your best friend, wife and your cat’s fake account, you most likely will face challenges even if you did great work and it might deserve community appreciation. 🐈

Tell me already what should I do

There are 3 important things you should take into consideration:

• channels
• timing
• Github “trending page”

ChannelsChannels are different ways (usually means websites) where you can share information about your project.

There is a list below:

• post to http://www.echojs.com. 3rd place (by popularity users came — to your Github repo from)
• post to https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/
• post to https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/ 2nd place
• post to https://news.ycombinator.com/show 2nd place
• post to https://lobste.rs
• post to https://dev.to/t/javascript
• submit your project to https://betapage.co . It looks ‘spammy’ but it has many people-like bots on Twitter who will share news about you
• submit your project to https://www.producthunt.com/ . Keep in mind that if you don’t have the account and gonna register — it will take at least 3 days you will get rights to publish, so do that in advance.
• submit your project to https://thetechladder.com/
• post to Twitter. Repeatedly. Make sure you put all hash-tags, so bots will pick up your tweet.
• post to gitter chats: https://gitter.im/andrewtelnov/surveyjs, https://gitter.im/chat-rooms/reactjs, https://gitter.im/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp
• contact famous guys from the related area (like Dan Abramov for React, etc). Send a private mail and ask feedback (try to be polite and not bother, they don’t have to answer you, but might).
• ask your friends to upvote your post. It should leave ‘cold’ state ASAP.

TimingThe timing is much more important than the number of channels. If you publish news at the wrong time no one will see them.

The good time of day is morning, people can read your stuff during their commute to work. The important thing is — the morning time is different for other countries, like US or China. It seems like usually, everyone tries to fit US morning time — obviously more traffic. But, I would say, it’s better to cover alternative channels at different times. For example: if you post to reddit/webdev to match China morning time, do the same in a half of a day for US time — post to reddit/javascript.

Don’t publish everything in one shot. Do it in portions, prepare community. For example, do the first tweet and publish to not very popular websites, talk to friends. You will receive your first stars and leave ‘cold’ state. Then, people will come later and see project already have ‘stars’, so it makes them easier ‘to star’ as well.

Reddit and hacker-news seem to be ‘the main’ sources, post there when your project started to get popularity, to keep and increase that growth.

Do regular tweets. But don’t spam.

Github “trending page”The main goal after start is to get to ‘trending’ page, due to statistics more than 60% visitors come from there. But here is a thing: it’s rating based list, so if at your time there are many new ‘React tools/libs’ and you don’t have ‘React’ or ‘Go’ in your repo’s title — they will beat you :p

If it doesn’t help

Don’t give up, review your project and make sure you did everything right. Check you have all points for ‘ideal README.md’. The ‘cover’ is really important. There is a cool article https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-get-up-to-3500-github-stars-in-one-week-339102b62a8f how to make it nice.

If that didn’t help as well

Well, keep doing, probably the next thing you build will go better. And remember, it’s easy to promote something you care about and spent quite a lot time to make it. Don’t build ‘TodoList’ app, we have quite many of them till now :)

If you liked this post and want to have updates about my next articles, please follow me on twitter @bliashenko!