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Editor 2.0 is the name we lovingly gave to our trusted Slate JS editor that had been used since day 1 of us launching Hacker Noon 2.0. This story walks you through the step by step of how to best utilize this editor, plus a few tips and tricks from our VP of Business Development/Blockchain Editor/Dentist extraordinaire on giving your story the best shot of going viral/getting published.

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

Visit hackernoon.com/signup

Enter your email and password or choose sign up with google
Choose your desired Handle.
Make sure everything be lower case and contain no space. Now this is the fun part - you can choose the tags you are interested in. This will customize your Daily Tech Brief and down the line, your very own homepage 😉. You can also choose to skip this step, no hard feelings!

Next, choose what kind of user you are!

Choose "I read and write"
You will then be directed to this page to fill out your profile including bio, picture, social links, and call to action.
That's it, now you have a writer account! Note that your CTA link won't work until you publish your first story!

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 2.0 draft:

Click on 'New Draft'

This is what you see next. You can either choose Editor 3.0 (with Markdown Support!), or Editor 2.0. The rest of this story is for editor 2.0 only. Here's the instruction for Editor 3.0.
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 it 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 and looks like this:

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

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:

Feature Image

Learn about the value of images here.

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.

Tags

Learn more about how to Maximize the Value of Tags here.

Below the section labeled

Tags

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

Meta Description

Learn more about the Value of Meta Description here

The section labeled '

Make Your Story Stand Out

' allows you to enter Meta Description that would help Search Engine recognize the content to highlight. When you share the URL of your story on different social media channels, Meta Description is often what appears under the feature image and title.

Canonical Link

Learn more about best republishing practices here.

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).

TL;DR

If you haven't been living under a rock, you would know that TL;DR means Too long, didn't read. But there you go!

Shhhh - don't tell anyone. But if you read until here, you've found yourself an Easter Egg! We will release a mobile app (soonish) wherein readers can simply swipe left and right (think - Tinderized app) to read the TL;DR of each story!

You can either write your own, or click

AI-generated TL;DR

to let our bot do it for you! :)

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 7-10 days of submission or so.

Enhance The 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 Connection

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

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 creating and distributin 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.

Hacker Noon Distribution Machine

Learn more about all the ways we distribute content here.

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 110k+ Noonification 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.

Something We Didn't Cover?
Email us at [email protected]✌️