And now we've made it here to chapter eight: Advertising and Sponsorships. If you know me or have followed me for any amount of time and know the philosophy that is in this book, then this might seem like another strange one. Kind of like the companion to the Events chapter of… is this really developer content? Now, in some cases, advertising and sponsorships isn't. But just like events, you do need to take a similar approach.

And of course, there are plenty of areas of advertising and sponsorships that need that same content strategy. Need to blend with the rest of the activities that you're doing. One of the things that I talk about in this chapter is that sponsorships are more likely than advertising to work with developers.

And I guess, I mean that, especially if you think broadly about advertising. Developers are well-known for installing ad blockers. They have their own ad blockers, just built internally into their brains that they seem to filter out things that seem like promotions. And so sponsorships are another way of being able to buy your way into interacting with developers.

Again, you have to go about it the right way just as you do at an event. And if we just even talk broadly about, advertising as sort of the just throwing swag at people at events and blasting promotions about your product. And I understand both of those are gross generalizations, but let's say that.

Then the sponsorship equivalent is the kind of making your event a conversation, inviting developers to interact with you. And sponsorships can do the same thing on a larger scale. When you find the right communities to sponsor and then you just show that you're there to support that community. And, to answer questions if they have them. And that it makes sense for you to be involved in whichever community it is you're sponsoring. And I, talk a little more about where to find those in the book. But really this approach goes back to remembering the developer currency, so of knowledge, sharing, and of doing that altruistically.

I think that there are ways that you can take the same approach with actual ads. And I think it would probably go to creating content in a way that's is something that someone would want to read, even if it wasn't an ad. Doing a deep guide, like we talked about in the Guides chapter and advertising that.

And in fact, I followed a link from LaunchDarkly, it was a Facebook ad or some social ad, and I clicked that. And the landing page I went to, which they paid to get me to go to, followed all of the rules that you would expect of not talking about the product, about selling the education that you're providing there, not the product itself. So there are ways that ads can work.

Sponsorships is an even smoother way to be able to work with developers and get the same sort of impact of advertising dollars. And so that is the approach that I take in all chapters of the book, including, the advertising chapter of Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.