How do you make a successful post on Indie Hackers?

Here are a few tips, in no particular order:

• Treat your posts like writing copy for your landing pages, cold emails, etc. The same rules apply! Understand your audience, and catch their attention by appealing to their problems or desires. State their problems first, and put your solution/question/offer later.

(FYI, the top reasons people come to Indie Hackers are: inspiration and motivation, tips and advice, and networking and connection with other founders. The top anxieties IHers feel about their startups are: trouble growing, coming up with and validating ideas, making the right decisions as a founder, and hiring.)

• Ask a question. Posts with questions in the title are more successful than posts without. Generally, this is because asking a question means you're thinking about your readers' state of mind, not just yourself and your desires.

• Start a discussion. Forums are a place to converse! One-sided announcements are boring. The best posts encourage readers to respond, and make it easy for them to do so. Our ranking algorithm rewards posts that generate discussion and have more comments.

• Engage people where they are. This is true of all channels, really. If you're tweeting, you should put the useful info in the tweet itself, not in a link to a blog post. Same on Indie Hackers. If you're just posting links to your blog, you won't find a lot of success.

• Help others out. As @patio11 and others are fond of saying, "being helpful on the Internet" is vastly underrated. People will remember.

• Look at what's worked in the past. It's quite easy to scroll through the best posts on a weekly or monthly basis and see the common patterns around what works well.

• Keep trying! If at first you don't succeed, there's no law against coming back to try again.

• Post milestones. I highly recommend creating a product page if you haven't already, and posting new milestones on a regular basis. Don't just share what you accomplished, but also share what you learned. Again, "be helpful on the Internet."

• Keep it short. If someone opens up your posts and sees a giant wall of text, they're unlikely to engage, especially if you're just asking for help rather than offering it. Make it easy for people.

• Get to the point. Skip the fluff, skip the context, skip the backstory. You should start offering value in your post in the first few sentences. Again, make it easy for people.

• Put in a clear call-to-action. If you have a question, put it at the end on its own line with a clear question mark. If you have a link, again, put it at the end in its own paragraph. People won't know what to do if you don't make it clear to them.

Hope this helps!

If you have any questions about how to get the most out of the site, just ask below! Or feel free to tag the wonderful @rosiesherry in any of your posts in the future.