On day 2 of the Hashnode bootcamp, Nader Dabit taught a lesson on leveraging social media for monetization in your dev career.

As a member of Developer DAO, I was stoked to hear Nader speak. The experience he shared was valuable and I wanted to share his insights with the community. The lessons are practical, and I plan to learn in public and use them to build the brand of my web3 consulting business.

Throughout this article, I'll be sharing content from the presentation and elaborating on how you can compound the value your social media provides.

Intro

The 3 key ways to leverage your social media for monetization are:

• Personal Branding

• Learn in Public

• Content Creation

Each part compounds with the other and can create an effective system for leveraging your online presence. Personal branding consists of your authentic and clear social media profile, which displays the content you create from learning in public. The more you can put your unique stamp on how you create through these different avenues, the better.

Personal Branding

What does your online presence say about you?

Most people are very busy, drawn in a million different directions with their attention fractured across tons of apps. You need to make the most of people's valuable time once they give it to you. When building a brand, people need to come away with something.

The "something" they come away with needs to be what you are trying to get across to them.

Making a clear profile

Making a profile that is clear and communicates your brand effectively is important.

Adding a clear biography and description of who you are or what you want to be is important. If you're focused on React or Vue, say that in your bio. This makes it easy to stand out from everyone else, as often people can default to being too generic.

If you need help with your profile, hiring someone to review your profile and make tips can be really helpful in the beginning.

Having a clean, clear and consistent profile picture helps to build up recognition. Recognition within your niche or community is important for building trust and relationships over time. At all times, optimize for clarity and authenticity.

Specialization

Specialization arises the more you distinguish yourself from the crowd.

It is easy to fall into a sea of generic profiles which makes it hard for you to stand out. Say you are good at a specific thing, and then spend a crazy amount of time on that specific thing. Keep deep diving your specific thing, create content around it, and then remix it into new forms.

This will compound opportunities in your niche, drawing more opportunities to you, and giving you more opportunities to improve your skills.

Learn in Public

Learning in public is one of the best ways to build your brand, generate valuable content, and help others solve their problems. You can even solve your own problems, post about how you've done it, and then remix the content.

At least for me, the rub in learning in public lies in the uncomfortable feelings that come with revealing something about my authentic self, about my creative work. These feelings are normal and an important signal that you are on the right track and growing. Growth is uncomfortable, and building a personal brand will cause you to feel uncomfortable at times.

When wondering what to post when you're learning in public, consider:

• Sharing code snippets

• Sharing your GitHub repos

• Sharing short videos on what you've learned

People will know about the stuff you're learning and ask you questions about it, increasing opportunities to build relationships and your community. This is also a great way to discover a niche and learn about the most pressing problems you can help them solve.

Building a Network of Backlinks

When you learn in public, you need to make your work publicly available.

Linking to your GitHub or portfolio site is important. Creating a web of backlinks on your profile builds dividends later, as each time someone interacts with any of your links, they see the network effect of your body of work.

You want to think about how to make your profile as clear as a 1-page resume vs. a 10-page resume. The more clear it is what you do and demonstrates specific examples through your links of the problems you solve, the better your growth will compound over time.

Your network of backlinks becomes more valuable as you create more content, creating a positive feedback loop.

Content Creation

The key to content creation is the process of learning, then building, doing and then communicating with what you've learned. The more this can become a self-reinforcing flywheel, the better.

When you've learned something new, you've condensed it into a succinct form for you to understand. This presents an opportunity to bring your insight to the rest of the world. Packaging up information in a smaller and new way can help people consume the info easier.

Learn something new and build an app with it, then open-source it, then document it in a blog post, then make a video showing how to do it. You've now rebuilt the same thing multiple times. When you have to teach it you understand it better.

Tips for Better Content Creation

Be Consistent

Aim to put in enough effort to get just 1% better a day. Over time you will see a lot of opportunities roll in. A great book on this is called: The Slight Edge.

Be Helpful Without Expecting Anything In Return

This builds goodwill with others and genuine relationships with others. Other people will see through you if you have ulterior motives. Leave others with an increase.

Be Authentic

You will often feel uncomfortable if you are being authentic. It's a good sign you're on the right track and growing. Try to intersperse your own personal touch and style to avoid sounding like a generic robot.

Be Active / Engaging

People don't always engage people they want to know actively. Identify some of the most influential people in your niche, turn on your notifications, and if you can jump in a conversation and contribute, go for it.

Walk the Line Between Engaging and Helpful Without Relying on Gimmicks

Avoid gimmicky tech threads and work on fusing your authenticity and communicating the unique synthesis of what you've learned. If you feel uncomfortable or cringe you are doing something right. Avoid playing to your audience for engagement, as your content can become stale and suffer from your most valuable trait: your authenticity.

Be Thoughtful About How You Format Your Writing

Make your work scannable. Optimize your content for simplicity so the lowest level person in your community can understand. A good way to simplify your content is to create an outline of each heading, and then build your content from there.

Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal

This quote applies just as much to technical content creation as to creating a work of art. When building your brand, you will be remixing and reusing your content in different ways across the different platforms in your backlinks.

Mix things you are learning and building to create something new. Take ideas that work in other industries outside of web3 or tech and experiment with applying them to what you are learning.

You only need to be good at one thing, deep dive into it, and then remix it into creative combinations that add value to your community.

Conclusion

I learned a lot in the Hashnode technical writing bootcamp, and the tips shared in this talk were practical and useful. My biggest takeaway was to fuse your authenticity with the value you create for others and work on creating a system of remixing your content in increasingly valuable ways. I'm going to be applying the tips to my own consulting business, and encourage anyone reading to build in public and help out others.