How to generate high-quality content as an engineer
I have been publicly active for several years now and while I tried to learn from my mistakes and from other people's work I came up with a couple of key points I closely stick to while publishing my work online. While my opinion might be a bit biased since I mostly write tech-oriented blog posts, I still consider the guidelines to be fairly general and useful, independent of which topic you intend to share with others.
As with every skill, you also have to master writing, and learning it to do it correctly is a never-ending story. Some people prefer to read less and rather scroll through images or practical examples while others prefer to read pages of text with many theoretical details and buzzwords. It’s hard to satisfy all the people and you also shouldn’t be worried much about that. But what you should be worried about is your posts, if they are not producing traffic ie. if you have a bad reads/views ratio or not even views. In that case, learn from others, learn from this post. Let’s start with some basics.
Rookie reading
The question I always ask myself before writing the post is: “Would I benefit from that post, reading it for the first time?” I think it’s crucial to answer that particular question since not only does it help you realize whether you’re bringing value to the world (or just creating trash) but also if the posts are worth the time you intend to spend. I’m a strong believer that if you find the information you write about helpful, then there are dozens of people beside you that will be excited to read it too. After you will post several of those, you will build a community around yourself and further understand what kind of people your work attracts.
A little confidence
The beginning is always the hardest since you’re doing something different, something you’re not comfortable with, something maybe none of the people around you is doing. Some say you have to just have to believe it or whatever, but I think having a strong WHY is key to staying persistent and holding on until the work becomes fun or also profitable. Ask yourself these questions:
- Why am I doing this?
- Why am I writing?
- Why not podcasts instead?
- Why is this good for me?
- Why would this be helpful to other people?
- What will I benefit from that?
- Why is this worth my time?
- …
Having answers to several such questions, helps you strengthen your will to do something and stick to the set goals. Don’t be shy, speak up!
It’s a learning process too…
I also think coming up with a post is actually a bit more than just starting to write something off the bat. It requires you to deeply think about the subject and I personally love it since it is a really fun learning process as well. To give you an example, I often find myself lacking a detail or two and I need to go back and learn about it. It’s those tiny missing pieces that you are not aware of until you try to explain them. What I’m trying to say is that it’s normal to get lost and not know everything and you should take it that way as well, that by writing something you will also sharpen your knowledge amongst other benefits.
Verbatim title
Starting with just the right mix of juice and ice is the way to go. You want people to be stimulated by your title and make them feel excited in a way that drives them to click on your post and read it. Hitting the correct notes is often quite challenging, but to give you a sense. Recently I noticed with my posts that over the last half a year people search for Raspberry Pi-related projects more often. Therefore when I included the Raspberry Pi term in my title, I immediately got about 40% more views than normal. Weird, but still it takes some creativity to come up with the correct buzzword to attract people. Additionally, takes special care not to be over creative and actually sell what you are advertising.
Grammarly
I think this one is the most important since I often found not only my posts but also other high-tech people having wrong pronunciation or tiny mistakes in texts that make things slightly imperfect. There might be some other auto-correction tool, but I find this one particularly useful. I have it set up as a Chrome extension and utilize it not only for my blog posts but in general also when I do code reviews, chat, etc.
Make it trivial to understand
As per Feynman: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. AMEN to that! Ask yourself: “Which blog post is the most boring to read?” In my case, it’s the one I don’t understand (until I do understand it after reading 10 other posts of course). But there are some cases you just can’t oversimplify and in that case, I suggest you give a link or a reference, where people can read more about the subject — I often even write a separate post about it, depending upon the adequacy of it. I must say that also highly depends on the audience, but even myself being 7 years in the business of software, I still love and prefer the simplest explanations.
Don’t reinvent the wheel
If you can scroll through the internet and find an article that already answers all of your questions and misunderstandings, you shouldn’t be writing about it. I mean you can, but not explicitly, like just don’t do it if you don’t have anything to add. Not only you’re reinventing the wheel, but also your learning curve won’t be as steep as you would like. Find something else, do some experiments, reverse-engineer something… There are many things you can do.
Abstract is important
I assume that if you want to write a post, you have a reason for that. You might want to compare things, share advice or opinion, describe the solution to the problem, or anything that you find interesting to compile into a blog post. In either case, you should bundle an abstract of your post on top of the story, that summarizes it in a couple of sentences. This is especially necessary in the case of Medium that only shows the top part of the story if you’re out of free member-only stories for this month. Not only will you attract people more doing that, but you’re also sort of like advertising what people can expect from your blog post, and what they will gain from reading it.
Images, sketches, and diagrams
While writing the post, think about the readers. “Are they getting bored? Is this text section too long?” Take some time to think about this and break the text by adding images or my favorite sketches or diagrams. Just have a look at these posts, the graphics are amazing. It’s true, that it takes additional time to prepare such graphs and I often lose an hour or two doing it, but I am a strong believer that a high-quality image speaks 1000 words.
I use Lucidchart for graphs since it is fairly simple to use but I also see people recommending Sketch.io. Have a look at Unsplash or Pexels for free high-quality images, but note that many bloggers use them and some readers might be tired of most.
Take your time
At least to me, writing technical blogs can be quite exhaustive. It’s not like putting things on the paper (well, actually on the screen), throwing buzzwords all over the place such that you lose half of the audience before even beginning to explain something. It’s important to reconsider every sentence you write. “Does it make sense? Does it fit in the current paragraph? Is this out of scope for this post?” I often read the post 3–5 times, while thinking about the reading flow and the size of the paragraphs, since I highly appreciate it if one considers it. Even if the writing takes you a month, it’s still very likely your subject will bring value to the community for the next 5–10 years.
Post EOL
This one is optional and not always necessary, but earlier this month I found myself reviewing my older posts, and I either added a small detail on the picture, removed a paragraph since the information got old, or added a section with an alternative solution to a problem. Eventually, all posts get outdated, but personally, until I find it beneficial I keep them as up-to-date as possible and I think you maybe should too — new readers will appreciate it.
Is there more?
There’s always more. Consider OGP or writing for any of the already established blogs like DevGenius, BetterProgramming, ITNEXT, Geek Culture, and many others.
Do you want to learn more about developer experience, programming, or how to promote yourself as an engineer and share high-quality work? Feel free to book an online coffee break with me for a review of your landing page, code, or sharing strategy.
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