Get listed in GitHub repos

The hack

List your product in GitHub listical repos.

Why it works

Thousands of niche repos receive hundreds of visits every month. They are almost exclusively from developers looking to solve a specific problem. This means high intent traffic. If you're looking at terminal extensions, you probably want a cool-looking terminal...

The second benefit is that GitHub is perceived as a trustworthy directory. Even if the backlink is no-follow the topical relevance is very high. Definitelly better than a backlink from a random blog post that gets no traffic.

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.

Here is the meta list, listing all awesome lists: GitHub - sindresorhus/awesome: 😎 Awesome lists about all kinds of interesting topics

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/video/newsletter 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.