Skip to main content

Best technical blogging tips in under 30 seconds


Before you start writing, have the answers to the questions below.  You can revise, iterate the answers as you write. This will make your blog crisp and help you to ship. 

QUESTIONS

  1. Who’s the audience?
  2. What audience questions will the blog answer?
YOU CAN STOP HERE. Start thinking and writing. Everything else is secondary – Tips, tricks, rules and all. 

These tips are from Larry McEnerny, professor of English at University of Chicago. The lecture is about 80 minutes, I highly recommend it. For the past couple of years, I’ve used this model to write my blogs which have been read over half a million times. At minimum, this helped me to structure my blogs faster and better. Hopefully, these have created better value to the readers.  When we’re not writing, we’re readers. We carefully search, select and see the content useful for us. We’re looking for things that are interesting and valuable. The crucial thing is the value. The value is in the eye of the beholder - entertainment, education or enchantment. That's why it's important to decide on the audience.

AUDIENCE

You write about a topic you’re an expert at or willing to research to write. At some point of thinking or research, finalize your audience. It can be everybody, even in a narrow field. I write about databases. Even within this narrow field, there are developers, administrators, architects, evaluators, influencers, CxOs.  Developers themselves can be divided into database developers, Java developers, data modelers, LAMP stack developers, Oracle developers, and so on.  So, the audience every one of my blogs cannot be "Database Enthusiasts", but a specific subset in them. So, decide. 

QUESTIONS

If you’re an expert in the topic you’re writing about, it’s difficult to determine the level of detail you want to write in a blog. Your friends, colleagues, and customers could read this blog.  This can tempt you to write a detailed and in depth article covering every nuance, taking the focus away from the value you’re trying to create to the target reader. Hence the clarifying question is critical: What questions from the audience about this topic will you answer in the blog?  This blogger literally wrote the questions in the blog itself. I usually start with a set of questions to frame my thinking, refer to the questions once in a while and at the end verify the blog answers the questions. 

Just because you’re answering the questions does not mean that blogs have to be just Q&A. You can weave a story, make a point or pursue a counterpoint while answering these questions.  The question will provide a guard rail for the scope of your blog and keep the focus on creating value for the reader.

Think of the questions and answers as a MVP - minimum viable product. Take the MVP away, the product is useless. It’s time for another parting tip paraphrasing Seth Godin: If you write regularly, the biggest beneficiary is yourself. Yes. Just youself - your thinking and your writing. If you're applying yourself sincerely, in time, others will benefit too.  Good luck.

 

 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MongoDB to Couchbase for Developers: Part 2: Database Objects

    MongoDB developers and DBAs work with physical clusters, machines, instances, storage systems, disks, etc. All MongoDB users, developers, and their applications work with logical entities: databases, collections, documents, fields, shards, users, data types.  There are a lot of similarities with Couchbase since both are document (JSON) oriented databases.  Let’s compare and contrast the two with respect to database objects.  Here’s the first part of this series comparing the architecture.   MongoDB Organization A full list of MongoDB schema objects is listed here and here . A database instance can have many databases; A database can have many collections; Each collection can have many indexes.  Each collection can be sharded based into multiple chunks on multiple nodes of a cluster using hash-sharding strategy or index sharding strategy.  The MongoDB indexes are local to their data.  Therefore, the indexes use the same strategy as ...
3 comments
Read more

Swami Vivekananda: The Monk That Nobody Sent to Chicago

  There’s a saying in Chicago: “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” This was the cold reception Swami Vivekananda faced when he arrived in the windy city in July 1893, determined to attend the World Parliament of Religions that September. He belonged to no organization, carried no letter of recommendation, his countrymen were nobody, and represented an alien religion to the Western world. As the days passed, his hope of attending the parliament dwindled. With money running out and the odds stacked against him, he left the Windy City and went to Boston, praying for a glimmer of opportunity.  Swamiji came to America to share India’s most profound gift: the wisdom of the Hindu sages, preserved through centuries of oral tradition and embodied by its monks. This was 1893, not 1993—India was under the British grip, its resources drained, and its spirit subdued. Swamiji’s mission was not just a cultural exchange; it was a bold step toward envisioning a future where India could re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Should Databases Go Natural?

From search to CRM, applications are adopting natural language and intuitive interactions. Should databases follow? This article provides a strategic perspective. Amid the many technological evolutions in software and hardware (CISC/RISC, Internet, Cloud, and AI), one technology has endured:  Relational Database Systems   (RDBMS), aka SQL databases. For over 50 years, RDBMS has survived and thrived, overcoming many challenges. It has evolved and adopted beneficial features from emerging technologies like object-relational databases and now competes robustly with   NoSQL databases .  Today, RDBMS dominates the market, with four of the top five databases and seven of the top ten being relational. RDBMS has smartly borrowed ideas, like JSON support, from NoSQL, while NoSQL has also borrowed from RDBMS. NoSQL no longer rejects SQL. From a user perspective, all modern databases have SQL-inspired query language and a set of APIs. All applications manage the respective data...
Post a Comment
Read more