Mastering the Art of Technical Blogging: Unveiling Insights from Over 1000 Pieces of Content

Crafting a compelling technical blog is akin to mastering an art form, one that can lead to extraordinary engagement within the developer community and build the cornerstone of your technical marketing strategy.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the precise steps and key elements that consistently propel tech blogs. Drawing from my experience as an author and editor of over 1000 pieces of technical content, we’ll navigate through the intricacies of creating impactful content tailored specifically for technical audiences.

The Process

Here is the system that I have used for every piece of tech blog.

Create a Tech Content Pipeline

Select a specific technical topic that resonates with both your expertise and the interests of your target audience. Collaborate with developers, solution architects, and product managers within your network to ensure authenticity and credibility. Remember, developers trust content created by fellow developers. If you are a technical marketer like me, a marketer should not be the author. The experts that create the technology or solution should always be the author.

Align your content with your product and go-to-market strategy, even if it remains product-agnostic. Topics with the highest traffic include open source, DevOps, and innovative customer engineering.

Interview Your Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Conduct thorough research on the topic. Leverage interviews with technical experts and developers to gather firsthand insights and perspectives. Conduct external research as well. I find having the SME talk through an outline of their topic and then asking questions at the end to be a great way to conduct your interviews. I do record these interviews with the SME, record with their permission, and transcribe it to create a draft faster.

Create a Draft

Craft a meticulously outlined draft that encapsulates the key points and ideas you intend to convey from the interviews and your research. Prioritize clarity and conciseness in your writing, supplementing it with visual aids like architectural diagrams and code snippets to enhance comprehension and engagement.

Embrace the Collaborative Editing Process

Fine-tune your draft through rigorous editing and proofreading, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and overall readability. Engage in collaborative editing processes to gather feedback and refine your content further. Review process can be difficult. At the top of each draft, I create a DACI matrix with an approval checklist so the process is transparent and knows when there are blockers.

Publish Once and Optimize Everywhere

Upon publication, leverage multiple channels — social media, newsletters, websites — to promote your blog. Consider syndicating your content across platforms to maximize reach and engagement, even beyond your primary blog channel. This step can be the difference of reaching thousands of readers vs. millions of readers in a year.

Sections of a Great Technical Blog

Now that we have covered the process, here are the sections of a great technical blog. Few overall tips:

• Your tech blog should use clear, concise language and tone. Avoid marketing and business jargon except the Opening section to increase readership by the technical audience. Some authors I work with like to inject personal humor, others do not. Your role as the editor is to honor their voice, but the language must be crisp and terse. Technical concepts lose meaning when you are too verbose.
• Include technical diagrams and code snippets. This helps both the technical and tech-enthusiast audience understand your tech blog better. Try to enter an image every 500–800 words to break up the blog to make it easy to read for the developer and give context to the code and words.
• Try not to go over 5000 words/5 minutes read. If you do, break up the tech blog into a blog series and deep link it together.

Here are the sections:

Title

Craft a title optimized for organic search, designed to resonate with and attract developers. I usually write the blog in it’s entirety, then use ChatGPT after to ideate on the most search engine optimized title.

ChatGPT tools are awesome to suggest after you have written all the sections. The prompt I use is “Suggest a title for this blog for the developer audience. Make sure the title is organic search optimized for developer audience.”.

Header Image

Select a visually captivating image relevant to your content. You can use stock image services or AI tools like Shutterstock, Getty Images, Canva, DALL-E, or Adobe Firefly.

Opening

Initiate your blog with a succinct articulation of the business problem you aim to address. Identify pain points within the developer community, setting the stage for your proposed solution.

Solution

Detail your solution approach, accompanied by architecture diagrams and code snippets where applicable. Provide comprehensive insights into the innovative methods or technologies employed to resolve the identified problem.

Challenges

Transparently share the challenges encountered throughout your journey, offering valuable insights and lessons learned to fellow developers facing similar obstacles. I find developers trust content and perform better when the authors are honest about the problems they faced.

Outcome and Lessons Learned

Reflect on the outcomes of your endeavors, extracting key lessons and insights. Whether through successful implementations or unforeseen setbacks, elucidate the wisdom gained from your experiences.

Next Steps

Outline future developments or follow-up actions related to the blog’s topic. Encourage continued engagement and conversation within the developer community, fostering an ongoing dialogue beyond the blog’s confines.

Call to Action

Conclude with a compelling call to action, guiding readers towards further engagement with your content and community. Whether through newsletter subscriptions or participation in developer portals, incentivize continued interaction.

References

Provide a comprehensive list of technical resources referenced within the blog, empowering readers to delve deeper into the discussed topics and expand their knowledge base.

Additional Resources

To further augment your journey in crafting exceptional technical blogs, consider exploring the following resources:

1. “The Definitive Guide to Technical Writing” by Sarah Maddox.
2. “Technical Writing: A Modern Approach” by Robert D. Brown.
3. “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

With these resources and insights at your disposal, you’re well-equipped to embark on the path towards writing compelling and impactful technical blogs that resonate deeply within the developer community.

Happy tech blogging!