I myself started learning programming late in life and didn’t teach myself until 2017, when I finished college. But I’ve always taken notes and written a blog. I started writing technical blogs when I first learned to program, so I’ve been writing technical blogs for 4 years. However, the articles I wrote at that time were mostly personal notes and there was not much reading.

I think I originally wrote it in Blogosphere and CSDN. But to be honest, the UI on both platforms is ugly and the text editor is uncomfortable to use. So we abandoned these two platforms.

I’ve been blogging on GitHub and GitHub Issues since I learned to use Markdown syntax and GitHub. During this period, in addition to writing personal notes, I often wrote about my daily life and experience.

Then I found nuggets and SegmentFault, which were much better than Blogs and CSDN, so I started reading and writing on them. I looked at my Nuggets account and the first post was posted on May 20, 2018.

After that, I discovered the platform Of Medium. I was attracted by its content and business model and decided to participate in it. Until now, my technical writing has mainly been done on Medium.

Here are some of my experiences and insights.

Prepared for

Here are some important questions to consider before you start writing technical writing.

purpose

Before starting tech blogging, I think there’s one thing that creators need to be clear about:

Are your articles personal notes or public blogs?

Personal notes are more for your own reading, to organize your knowledge and experience. You can write in a language that only you can understand, and you don’t need to pay attention to typography and format. But don’t expect too much reading from your personal notes.

Public blogs are written for readers. Creators should everywhere stand in the perspective of readers to consider the problem, everything to think about the following points:

  • What can the reader learn from this passage? Or what problem does it help the reader solve?
  • Are explanations of concepts and principles easy to understand?
  • Is the layout and illustration of the article comfortable for the reader?

I didn’t figure this out myself when I started writing. I started out writing personal notes, but expected to get as much reading as public blogs. That was the mistake I made.

The following is thought of in terms of a public blog post.

The creation time

The second question to ask is: How much time do you plan to spend on technical writing?

There are about three levels:

  • Occasional creative
  • Type a sideline
  • Full-time creative

Some friends are busy with their own work and do not have too much time to write. They can only share some content occasionally, which is the type of occasional creation.

There are also some friends will take a break from busy, stable out part of the time energy on writing, this is a sideline type. I have to say, writing is a great sideline for programmers.

Finally, full-time creative work. Quit your day job and take creation as your main occupation.

Technical creators should seriously consider how much time they can devote to content creation. If it is occasionally creative, I think there is no need to operate wechat public number of private domain flow, choose some suitable large platform is better.

The content type of the article

In my opinion, the content of technical articles can be roughly divided into the following five types. Each type has its own characteristics.

  • The conventional type
  • Repetition is new
  • Empirical type
  • Innovative and creative type
  • Practical project

The conventional type

One of the characteristics of the tech community is that some topics are discussed over and over again, even in a somewhat rehash way. Topics like closures and array API usage, for example, are topics I’ve read countless times on the front pages of every platform.

Because articles on these topics come up again and again, I call them regular articles.

The great thing about regular writing is that it has already been written many times before you start writing it.

So should we avoid conventional articles in the selection process?

At the beginning of my own writing, I had deliberately avoided such topics. Because I felt that this topic had been written about so many times that there was no point in writing it myself. But then I found myself running out of topics to write about if I avoided them.

So my strategy now is: you can write about normal topics, but you have to be creative. For example, add some mind maps to the article, add some rich code examples, etc. In short, let your article have some characteristics, so that readers are willing to review this knowledge point through your article.

Repetition is new

Some topics are naturally repeatable, such as:

  • The most popular repo on GitHub
  • 10 MUST-know NPM packages
  • Recent updates to ECMAScript, Vue, React
  • .

If you want, you can repeat the above topic every few months and update the article as appropriate.

Empirical type

The article of experience is very easy to understand, everyone in their own work and study, more or less have a feeling. As long as the earnest summary of their own comprehension, there will always be some audience.

Innovative and creative type

In addition to the above three types, some articles may be novel in their choice of material and can write some content that is not available on the Internet.

However, this kind of content can be found, or depends on the inspiration of the individual.

Actual combat item

Programming articles are very hands-on. As a technical creator, can combine their own project experience, write some actual combat type of article.

Content of the form

From the perspective of content media, there are three types:

  • graphic
  • video
  • audio

Programming articles tend to show code, so audio is not a good format for technical articles.

And text and video do contrast, each has its advantages and disadvantages.

The video content is more expressive and can clearly show the development environment, the process of writing the code, and so on.

However, I prefer graphic creation for the following reasons:

  • Graphic creation can be constantly optimized and modified, in line with the idea of agile development.
  • The production cost of graphics is relatively low and the creation speed is faster
  • Graphic content is more easily retrieved by search engines

Source of traffic

When you write a tech blog, you want to get more people to read it. So what are the traffic sources of an article?

I used to worry a lot about traffic myself, but after writing, I think there are probably three main sources of traffic

  • Recommended traffic for the platform
  • A personal brand
  • Search engine

The recommended flow

You can publish your articles to a certain platform, such as Zhihu, Nuggets, Medium. Once your article is recommended by the platform, your article can reach the existing users of the platform and get a lot of traffic.

A personal brand

If you are well known, many readers will seek out you and your articles. That kind of traffic comes from personal branding.

For example, I am a loyal fan of Teacher Ruan Yifeng, from his personal website, to Yuqi, and then to the wechat public number, where he goes I will follow where. I’ve been contributing a little bit of reading to his articles.

Search engine

Programmers are probably the most frequent users of search engines. As users, we look up information through search engines. Similarly, as content creators, we should get our articles searched by search engines and rank as high on the results page as possible

The first three are the main sources of traffic for tech blogs. There are other sources of traffic, such as social sharing and advertising, but I don’t think they are mainstream enough to discuss them.

Realizable way

Finally, the way to liquidate. After seriously writing technical articles, I think most people hope, to some extent, that they will get some financial reward for doing so. At the same time, if we can get some material return, it can also stimulate our creative enthusiasm.

In my observation, tech blogs generally have the following ways to cash out:

  • The patch advertising
  • Wide soft
  • Paid to read
  • Membership subscription

A patch AD is a link to an AD inserted into an article. If it is an individual blog, you can access the advertising alliance. If it is a wechat official account, the official account directly provides the function of inserting advertisements.

At the same time can also cooperate with some advertisers. Now I subscribe to many wechat public accounts, and find that many of them have cooperation with some training institutions, and occasionally send some advertising copy.

Then there’s paid reading, and if your content is good enough, you can just make a course and sell it. Domestic knowledge payment platforms include gold digging pamphlets, Geek Time, MOOC, open class bar and so on.

However, the previous several are the way I observe other people’s cash, in fact, I have not directly tried. I have been writing on Medium for the past two years. The business model of Medium is somewhat special. For those who know more about it, you can refer to my previous articles.