The hack
List your product in GitHub listical repos.
Why it works
GitHub remains one of the magical places on the internet, which is unspoiled by the boom of backlink-building. Thanks to all of their links being “no-follow” by default, it isn’t interesting for link builders and SEO folks.
Writing to a blogger and asking for a free shout-out is difficult nowadays, because of the sheer volume of backlink-building spam emails those people get. Admins of GitHub repos however, don’t get that many.
Thousands of niche projects receive hundreds of visits every month. Those visits come from developers (non-devs don’t go to GitHub) and are very problem and topic-specific (people looking at terminal projects want a cool-looking terminal). Apart from that, GitHub is perceived as a trustworthy directory. Especially when compared to a random blog they find on Google. This makes it a perfect place to show off products.
How to do it
The awesome lists
The best place to start is awesome lists. Those link to the best resources related to any language, framework, or project.
Find the list closest to what you’re building and check if you can plug your product there. Most of them have a learning resources part, so you can link to your blog as well.
Make sure you check the latest pull request. If they are more than three months old and no new ones are being added, don’t waste your time here. A lot of awesome lists are dead and aren’t adding any new content. In that case, go more niche and find one that does. Or if you’re bold enough, you can try making your own.
In case you want to go language-specific, you can also search by language and check for most stars. It’s a great starting point, but be careful about judging repos solely on the number of stars. The ultimate metric is still traffic.
Niche repos
The second best method is looking into niche repos related to what you’re doing. You can search GitHub by topic at: https://github.com/topics. If you’re unsure about the topic, explore related repos and what topics they list in their About section.
If your pull request isn’t accepted, or it’s taking too long, you can try writing to the owner directly. Read → How to find the email of everyone on GitHub and → 101 of cold email (beginner guide) to learn how to do it.
