Guide to “guest-post” on Hacker Noon

A Step by Step Guide

Getting Published on Hacker Noon is as easy as setting up your FREE account, firing up the Editor and hitting 'Submit Story for Review.' No need to get expensive middlemen PR companies or luring one of the existing 10k+ Hacker Noon writers. You heard that right. There’s no “guest posting” whatsoever, because we are 100% contributor-driven!

Do your own thing. Here's how:

How to write on Hacker Noon

You do not need to apply and sacrifice unicorns to the Devil. Simply visit the website and click on Start Writing at the top right.

How To Sign Up To Become a Hacker Noon Contributor

• Add your email and a strong password

• Click Next

• Go to your Email and click on the Verification Link

• You'll be redirected to the Login Page

• Add your User Name

• Your Hacker Noon handle will be auto-generated but you can change it before clicking next

• Click Next

• That's it. You're Now a Hacker Noon contributor.

What you see next is your Hacker Noon Contributor Dashboard

How To Submit Your Story to Hacker Noon for Publishing

Let's walk you through the steps by creating and submitting a sample draft:

• Click on 'New Draft'

• The Page that opens is called the Hacker Noon Writer Dashboard

• Click on 'Title' and give your story a Headline

• Hit Enter

• You are now in the 'Body' of your Hacker Noon Story Draft

• Write out your story

• Click 'Save' if you wish to finish the story later

• Once done, click on 'Story Settings' and 'Submit Story for Review' to submit your draft for review by the Hacker Noon Editors

While this covers the basics of submitting a story to Hacker Noon, you might want to make the story more reader-friendly by adding images, code-snippets, and format it in a manner to enhance readability. Here's how you format your Hacker Noon Draft before submitting to the Hacker Noon Editors for review.

How to Add Images and Code Snippets to Your Hacker Noon Draft

Images and code-snippets can be added by clicking on the '+' symbol that appears on the left border of the active line in the body of your Hacker Noon Story Draft. Clicking on the '+' symbol auto-expands it to show three icons.

The GIF below depicts how to add images to your Hacker Noon Draft

Steps to Add An Image to Your Hacker Noon Draft

• The first button on the expanded '+' icon is the Import an Image button

• Click on it to choose the source of your image

• You can add an image via any of the following sources - Local Machine, URL, Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, and Dropbox

• If the source is correct, you will see a preview of the image

• Click 'Upload' to add the image in your Hacker Noon Story Draft

• That's it. Your image is now uploaded

Steps to Add A Code Snippet to Your Hacker Noon Draft

• The second button on the expanded '+' icon is the Import a code snippet button

• Click on it to add your code snippet

• A code-editor window pops up where you can write/paste your code snippet

• In the 'Language' field, fill in the programming language of the code snippet

• Click 'Insert' to add the code in your Hacker Noon Story Draft

• That's it. Your code-snippet is now uploaded

The GIF below depicts how to add code snippets to your Hacker Noon Draft

The third icon in the expanded '+' icon adds a horizontal separator below the line where it was added.

How to Format Your Hacker Noon Draft Before Submitting for Review

Select a segment of the text and a format bar will show up to help make the segmented text easier to read. It looks like this:

The first icon makes the selected text formatted Bold. You can also format bold a selected text snippet by pressing Ctrl+B (or command+B on Macs).

The second icon makes the selected text formatted italicized. You can also format bold a selected text snippet by pressing Ctrl+I (or command+I on Macs).

The third icon makes the selected text formatted as a highlighted code.

The fourth icon makes the entire paragraph containing the selected text formatted as a quote.

• The fifth icon makes the entire paragraph containing the selected text formatted as an unordered list.

1. The sixth icon makes the entire paragraph containing the selected text formatted as an ordered list.

The seventh icon enables you to add a hyperlink to the selected text.

Optimizing Your Story for Distribution Within the Hacker Noon Ecosystem

Clicking on 'Story Settings' at the top right open up your story menu. It looks like this:

Clicking on the 'CLICK TO UPLOAD FEATURED IMAGE' lets you add a featured image to your story. This is the default image that is associated with your story during distribution within and outside the Hacker Noon Ecosystem.

Clicking on the 'UNSPLASH' lets you pick a free featured image from the Unsplash library.

Below the section labeled Tags, you can choose up to 8 different tags of length 30 characters each. Tags determine which tagged pages will your story be distributed in. Thus, adding all 8 tags will ensure that your story is distributed in at least 8 different Hacker Noon tag pages.

The section labeled 'First Seen At' allows you to embed a canonical link to the location where this story was originally published. In case it is an original story, you can leave it blank.

Canonical links pass the link juice to the page that hosted the original content. This is helpful for extremely successful writers who already have a huge following on the internet, such as a Neil Patel or a Vitalik Buterin. For the rest of us, not including a canonical link helps leverage Hacker Noon's high Domain Authority to show your story higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Once all of the above fields are filled, click 'Submit Story for Review' to notify Hacker Noon Editors of your story submission. If you've missed out on any of the above steps, an Editor will reach out to you via:

• Email or;

• Community DM

to add the missing information so be on the lookout for that if your story is not published within 3-5 days of submission.

Enhance Your Chances of Your Story Going Viral

Firstly, complete your profile on Hacker Noon to increase its credibility. Check out this Hacker Noon Help Section article for more information.

Improve Your Story's Headline

The Headline of your story should be attractive and make the reader curious to read more. Check out these links below to use the power of AI and programming wizardry to analyze your Headlines:

• Co-Schedule - Analyze your Headline for Impact

• Advanced Marketing Institute - Analyze your Headline for Emotional Connect

• BlogAbout - Find a Blog Topic to Write About

• Hubspot - Find a Headline for your Keyword

Improve the Readability of your Story

Once you're done writing and formatting your draft, you need to improve its readability. You can try any of these tools to analyze your story:

• Hemingway App

• Grammarly

Follow the Advice of the Digital Marketing Gurus

• Neil Patel

• Brian Dean

• Ahrefs

• Moz

• SEMrush

Conclusion

It is easy to get disheartened if your story does not achieve the kind of success that the Marketing Gurus mentioned above are clocking even though your stories are much better.

These guys have a vast content distribution mechanism that includes paid, affiliate, and

sometimes even black magic (allegedly).

They also have entire content teams dedicated to create and distribute their stories across various content media channels, social media channels, and microblogging channels. Check out Gary Vynerchuk's Pyramid Strategy to get an idea of how they do it.

Coming back to Hacker Noon. It is your best bet, as a beginner, intermediate, or even an expert writer who does not possess the vast distribution channels. Once you submit stories on Hacker Noon, this is what happens behind the curtains:

• A Hacker Noon Editor fixes your story and formats it for better readability

• Hacker Noon publishes your story in 8 different tag pages

• Hacker Noon distributes your story on its Twitter and Facebook multiple times over a period of one month

• Hacker Noon's high domain authority gets your story indexed within minutes on search engines and ranks it higher than most other competing stories

• Hacker Noon distributes your stories to its 60k+ newsletter subscribers - daily

• Hacker Noon's curated 'hackernoon top story' tag distributes your best stories with a custom image on its social media

All said and done, the best and surest method to go viral is to continue writing regularly - fixing what's broken and amplifying what works. As you've heard, it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery over a skill, its best to start chipping away at those hours right away.