100 Dev.to Articles Later: What I Learned About Content Marketing for a Side Project

I've now published nearly 100 articles on dev.to as part of a content marketing strategy for BabyNamePick.com , a baby name generator I built. Here's what I've learned. Why Dev.to? Dev.to has high domain authority (DA 60+), which means backlinks from dev.to carry real SEO weight. For a new site trying to build authority, this matters enormously. But there's a catch: the content needs to be genuinely useful, not just link spam. Dev.to's community will downvote or ignore low-effort posts. The Strategy My approach was to write articles that: Teach something real — linguistics, cultural history, naming traditions Naturally include links — to relevant pages on my site Target different audiences — developers (tech stack posts), parents (name guides), culture enthusiasts (origin deep-dives) What Worked Cultural deep-dives performed best. Articles about Basque names , Georgian names , and Tibetan names got more engagement than generic "top 10 names" posts. People are curious about cultures the