
Ask HN: How to advertise your python package? - mapa17
I happily and full of pride put my first package on pypi but now I wonder on how to make people aware of it, in oder to see if others can make any use of it, and to get feedback on the project.<p>How do you advertise your packages?<p>thx, Manuel
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Rjevski
Write about it and let search engines do their thing.

There's pretty much no success in advertising a package/library - not many
people randomly browse for packages and even if they stumble upon yours they'd
probably forget about it the next day before they find an use-case for it.
Even paid ads wouldn't work.

People who actually have a problem to solve however will search for it,
hopefully find your article and if you it's a good fit they will use it.

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hluska
Would the package support tutorial articles? (ie - How to {{do important
thing}} with {{package}}).

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mapa17
Well i guess I could write a kind of tutorial showing its application. So your
suggestion would be to write such a short tutorial, in form of a blog post? On
sites like medium.com?

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hluska
The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that if I were in your shoes, I'd market it just like I'd
market a product. I don't think it makes much sense to put money into
marketing a library that you built, so let's assume that you have zero budget.

Your goal is to get more users. Since you're looking for more users, you want
to make sure that developers have success when they implement it, so good
documentation and tutorials are a must anyways. So, I'd piggyback and turn the
tutorial into an acquisition tool because hell, if you're doing it anyways,
why not try to get some users out of it?

If I were you, I'd spend some time thinking about what kinds of terms people
would google if they had a problem like your library solves. You can use
Google Trends for help. And then write a tutorial about how to solve that
problem with your tool. As you write it, your goal should be to capture people
who google how to solve your problem and show them a solution so eloquent that
they install your tool to implement it. Discoverability is a problem, hence
the need to think carefully about how people would search for solutions to
your problem.

After you write the tutorial, it would be a good idea to post it on sites like
this one. Depending on what kind of tool it is, what sort of problem it
solves, and how usable it is, it might even be a good candidate for a show HN.
And then, depending on how much work you want to put into this, you can keep
using that tutorial to drive more users to your tool. For example, if people
ask about the problem on Stack Overflow, if you disclose that you wrote the
tool, there wouldn't be anything wrong with contributing answers that use your
tool.

Where to publish it is more complicated. If you're purely looking for users
and don't care about money or time, it would be the absolute best to buy a
domain and build a site around the package. That's overkill most of the time.

If you want to brand yourself, I'd publish the tutorials and documentation on
your own website.

As for Medium, you could absolutely use it, though you do end up giving away
lots of the branding and search benefits you'd get from publishing it on a
property you control. In exchange, it's incredibly easy.

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alienreborn
post in on /r/python and write a small comment about why created it etc.. Its
generally a welcoming subreddit.

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malux85
You get it out there any way you can, for example when you post somewhere, at
the very minimum, include a link!!!

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mapa17
Well I guess its not that easy. Many sites are not happy about this kind of
advertisement. I posted the same question contained a link to the package on
stackoverflow, but the question was deleted and now my rating is so low that i
got blocked for several days ...

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Jugurtha
Can you post a link, please?

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mapa17
[https://pypi.org/project/configfy/](https://pypi.org/project/configfy/)

