I've been working in commercial development since 2011. Since the end of 2012 I have been developing for iOS. I wrote my first technical article on Habré at the beginning of 2017 about an approach to localizing mobile applications . Then I released a few more articles on iOS development on Habré and at the end of 2017 I moved to a new company and decided to blog about solution architecture https://medium.com/@nvashanin , where I began to describe general concepts, responsibilities of an architect, his skill -set, etc. By the summer of 2020, the number of views of my articles exceeded 800 thousand, and the amount of time people spent reading - more than 6 million minutes, or about 12 years of net time. The flagship article has been translated by other people into different languages: for example, Polish orSpanish .
In this article I will tell you about my path to a tech blog - from idea to regular publications. I'll tell you what you can write about, how to write and how to format articles, as well as how to make money on them. For example, I managed to buy myself a watch with the money the blog brought. The article is suitable for those who are just thinking about writing articles, and will also be useful for those who are already actively writing.
Background
It became interesting for me to develop towards a software architect back in 2016. In early 2017, I attended the first three-day intensive course in my life, where a seasoned architect talked about the basic concepts. By the end of the intensive, we united into teams that had to take the proposed problem, come up with an architectural solution for it and defend it in front of other teams. Honestly, then it turned out badly for me.
I was already a team lead for several years, then I moved to another company and found out that there is a separate branch of development - architects. To do this, I had to work on my project as an architect and pass an assessment through a committee of mature architects. I passed this committee only the second time, six months after the first attempt. The overall pass rate in the company for this position was about 25%.
And at the end of 2017, when I began to unofficially act as an architect on a large project, along the way I started a blog in which I began to write about career development. I wanted to figure it out better myself. And also to help those who are in a similar situation and are thinking about where to go after the team lead, except for the management branch. This is the main motivation why I started blogging. Let's see what other reasons there might be for this.
Why keep a tech blog
I often hear the question: "Why do I need a blog?" Here are just a few reasons - and they are relevant not only for the IT sector.
Pump knowledge. If you are interested in a topic and want to understand it better, write an article. So you can improve your own knowledge and sort it out "on the shelves." I started a blog because I wanted to structure my knowledge of the software architect's job.
Build a personal brand. Even as a developer, you are in the community. Knowing you in the community will make it easier for you to find a new dream job, get promoted, increase your income, and gain the respect of others in your field.
And also, by competently developing your personal brand, you can become an influencer - that is, a specialist whose opinion other members of the community listen to. One of the striking examples is the case of the guys from Rambler. In 2016, they managed to recommend VIPER as the best presentation layer architecture on iOS and an alternative to more classic MVC and MVVM among the Russian iOS community. And all thanks to intelligent presentations and helpful articles. A lot of companies and developers have dragged VIPER to themselves, some are still using it.
Promote the company.Personal brand building is always closely intertwined with strengthening the company's brand. This is a mutually beneficial situation: you help attract the best talent, set a good example for your colleagues, tell the market about the product and useful insights, and the company encourages you in one way or another.
Of course, it is important that the company's management also understands the value of this story and keeps employees active. We at Cardsmobile are now actively working to strengthen the HR brand in the market, and perhaps my articles will help motivate the guys on the team to share knowledge, write articles and speak.
To earn money.Most people start blogging to make money. This is a common reason for travel or beauty, but, paradoxically, IT blogging rarely gets money. Although there are still opportunities: I bought myself a watch with the money that the blog brought me - although I did not set myself the goal of making money.
What to blog about
The question that everyone who decides to start a blog faces is: "What to write about?" Most often, the topic for articles is prompted by the very reason why you decided to start a blog. If you decide to upgrade, write articles about what you want to understand. If you strengthen the company's brand and your own, talk about your work, projects, technologies used.
For myself, I have identified the following areas - or headings:
Reviews. If you saw a new technology, try to explain it in the format “from A to Z”. Find out what is being talked about at specialized conferences, what is currently in trend. Almost everything new has great potential for exploration and deep diving. Reviews of books read are also good.
Cases.Did something interesting - tell us about it. A common mistake is the feeling that you are not doing anything interesting. Often the opposite is true. Look at your work from the outside, not from the inside, and fight the impostor syndrome .
If you work with a high-load back-end, tell us how you do the highload and why it is so. Layout UI - tell us about an interesting animation you've made. We used a new technology in the project - tell us about your experience with it. Your pitfalls and insights will help others not to sit on the problem for hours.
Guides. Take a problem and try to solve it. Describe the solution in detail - you will get a kind of guide for those who encounter a similar problem.
Analytical notes.Form your own opinion on a new technology or an issue of concern to the market. I'll clarify that this format is more suitable for influencers who already have an audience and whose opinion the community listens to.
Articles with humor. Take a serious topic and talk about it in an easy way. This goes to the audience.
A couple of tips for finding topics
Record colleagues' questions. Most companies have things that the community will be interested in. It is not difficult to find such topics: analyze what processes and technologies newcomers are most often asked to talk about - and write about this.
Read news and trends. This is an endless stream of new topics for your blog. When preparing an article about any news or trend, you solve two problems at once: you pump your own knowledge and save time for other community members by collecting information for them.
Read comments on other people's articles. This is a treasure trove of information about what interests and worries other people.
Remember that there are usually few unique and ingenious ideas. Anyway, everything was already invented by someone. Nevertheless, this is not a reason not to write, because there are few good descriptive texts. My advice: just write and over time you will learn to quickly find interesting blog topics.
How to write a good article
Share unique content. The main rule of good text: it must be unique. No one is interested in reading what has already been published somewhere. In addition, according to the rules of some sites - including Habr - it is forbidden to publish non-unique content: this is punishable not only by minuses in karma, but also by a ban.
Make a plan. An interesting and easy-to-understand article begins with a plan and structuring of the main points. Mind maps help me sketch out a good skeleton of an article. For this article, we got a small mind map, but sometimes solid ones come out. Below is a mind map I put together to tweet about my experiences in the Netherlands.
Make the plan as detailed as you can. Try to highlight all the main ideas that you want to reveal in the article.
Stick to structure. To make it easier for the reader to navigate the article, use the traditional structure consisting of an introduction, body and conclusion.
- Introduction
- Main part.
- Conclusions or conclusion.
At the end of the article, succinctly formulate the main ideas that you revealed in the text in order to put everything on the shelves in the reader's head, or leave room for thought. At the end of the article, you can also add useful links on the topic so that interested readers can study the topic in more detail.
Write as you speak. You should not come up with complex constructions, if in everyday life you talk differently - be yourself. At the same time, the text must be literate, without parasitic words and other verbal garbage.
Come up with a capacious name.There are no secrets to help you find the perfect wording or headline length. Formulate the title so that it reveals the content of the article and helps the reader make a choice: to read or not read. Sometimes catchy and incriminating headlines are triggered - they catch attention, but it is important that the content of the article meets the expectations of the reader. It also makes sense to study the search engine results in order to understand what topics are most often searched for. Always choose the title after you've finished writing the content of the article so it will be as relevant as possible.
Don't forget the pictures. Without them, nowhere - dry text without pictures is boring to read. Choose images that fit the meaning, or funny pictures that add a little lightness to serious reading.
The title picture for the article - teaser (from English tease - to tease) deserves special attention. From the name, the mechanism by which it should be selected is clear: it should cause a desire to open a link. This is important, because the first thing a person pays attention to is the picture. A cute visual will get more attention and transitions.
If possible, duplicate the name of the author and the name of the company in the picture - this is how they are considered better.
I select pictures for my articles from the game Monument Valley. I subconsciously associate it with architecture and complex design and, in my opinion, fits well for a title. And in general, this is a very cool game - I advise.
Check the content. I do not publish the written article right away. I have a ritual that I strictly follow - this is a review consisting of several stages.
Check spelling, punctuation and text style. I advise you to use special automated services: Spelling - for spelling, punctuation and stylistics; Advego - for stylistic text checking; Chief editor - the king of services, who cleans the text of verbal garbage. For texts in English, I use the paid version of the Grammarly service .
Checking by reviewers.In the areas I write about - from iOS development to architecture - I have several good reviewers - specialists whose opinion I trust. They are well versed in the topic and can give comments on the content: in iOS - a developer from VK, my good friend from St. Petersburg, and in architecture - an architect from Google in Silicon Valley. If you don't have such experts in mind, show the article to your manager or colleagues. Large companies, in which the content production process is put on stream, collaborate with external reviewers.
Proofreading by a technical writer.I always send English texts to native speakers. They help to reformulate phrases so that they sound better in the language of the article. I send texts in Russian to familiar technical writers - they also help with suitable wording.
As a result, the article was approved not only by me, but also by strict reviewers, which means that the trust in such content is higher.
Where to publish your article: site selection
If the company has its own blog, you can start there. If not, there are two options: existing sites or a blog on your domain.
There are a lot of blog platforms: Habr is popular among the Russian-speaking audience , Medium is popular among the English- speaking audience . There are also many platforms for creating your own blog. Each approach has its own pros and cons.
Popular platform
+ Advanced SEO, thanks to which your article will be found by readers. This reduces the costs - both time and money - for blog promotion. At the same time, the platforms generate traffic not only for new articles: I have not been writing since August last year, but every month my articles receive about 25 thousand views.
+ Ready-made UI that simplifies the layout of articles . The platforms offer user-friendly editors with a variety of templates and mechanics built in. Medium, for example, has a block with an automatic calculation of the time it will take to read an article. Articles are also easy to read: the editors by default provide "air" in the text, font variations, headings, convenient work with pictures and much more.
+ Simple launch.The work on the article follows a simple scenario: writing -> publishing.
- Basic styling customization. If you want a complex layout or non-standard features, this option will not work.
- The need to accept all the rules of the blogging platform. Nuances from a legal point of view are not excluded, and you may also be banned for violation, which will lead to the complete loss of your blog. It is also about privacy: for example, you cannot publish private correspondence or make a full copy of an article from another site. Such moments seem obvious, but it is better to read the platform rules at the start.
- Dependence on the demand for the site. If the service loses popularity, then your blog loses popularity.
Blog on your own domain
The pros of popular platforms are the cons of blogging on your domain. And the disadvantages of platforms are the advantages of their own platforms.
You can customize your blog the way you want, but at the start you will need to invest a lot of resources. In addition, your own site requires a large budget and involvement in promoting, generating and retaining traffic, while blogging platforms themselves generate traffic for you.
If you still want to have your own domain, some sites "allow" you to set up your own domain name and publish articles under it - this option is available, for example, on Medium. After evaluating all the pros and cons of both options, I started blogs on two platforms: on Habré and Medium.
How to promote an article
If you decide to launch a blog on the platform, by default you will have access to the traffic generated by the platform itself. It makes sense to involve an SEO specialist in promoting your blog on your own domain.
There are other promotion formats that can attract readers - regardless of the site on which you are hosted. I share the ways that helped me specifically.
Send the link to your friends. This is a priori loyal audience. Most likely they will read your article and like it. Such activity can help to get out in the daily top, which, in turn, will generate more traffic from the site.
Publish the link on all social networks.Even if your social networks are not promoted, posts will still generate a certain number of views - this is already good at the start. In my case, Linkedin works best, where I have more than 3 thousand contacts, mainly the English-speaking community. But Instagram, in my opinion, doesn't work for IT blogs at all.
Send your link to influencers. These can be bloggers, publics and publications on topics similar to yours. Perhaps your article will be added to the mailing list or published in the feed. I had a case with a publication on the Telegram channel with a couple of thousand active readers .
Give presentations.Attending conferences also strengthens your personal brand. You can share your blog link with your audience and thereby increase its organic reach. This is not intrusive advertising: the audience that listens to you is, by default, interested in the area you talk about and write about, and you offer them more useful content.
All of these mechanics will help you become an expert in your field and become more famous in the community. I don't consider myself an influential expert in software architecture, but my blog has a steady audience and generates new and useful contacts. Below are a few posts from Linkedin that have turned into interesting conversations.
Linkedin screenshots
I have a motivating story from a past job. Epam is a big company, and even as an architect, you may never run into a CTO. But it still happened to me, and at the moment of meeting he noted that he read my blog and liked my articles.
How to monetize your blog
Let's move on to the most provocative topic - is it possible to monetize a blog, and how to do it.
Important disclaimer. Before adding monetization, check the rules of your company - if you are writing from a company, and the rules of the site where you publish. The points related to monetization are most often clearly spelled out - knowing them, you can avoid negative consequences: for example, a ban and loss of your blog.
Types of monetization
There are two directions of monetization.
Straight. You get paid directly for writing the article.
Indirect. You don't get paid directly for writing the article, but your income will still grow. It works like this. For example, let's say you speak at conferences for money. Your blog with quality articles increases your visibility and expertise in the community, and you will be able to increase the price for your performances. Another scenario is also possible: if you are developing a paid product, mention it in articles - this can stimulate sales. It is also possible to "monetize" you as a specialist: the image of an expert affects wages and the likelihood of employment in cool companies.
Indirect monetization is a too voluminous area, so I will not consider this topic in detail in this article and will focus on direct monetization, on those financial flows that can be touched.
In direct monetization, the key metric is incoming traffic, or rather the number of views and readings of an article. The number of reads increases income and generates the main cash flow. Roughly speaking, if you double your incoming traffic, your income is likely to double as well.
An important aspect is the focus (targeting) of the audience. I'll explain using the example of a blog about British politics. The traffic to the site was very low, so the author set low advertising prices. But once the author was informed that his blog was read by the British Prime Minister, and he realized that he could hike the prices of advertising to the skies, since the blog is read by the country's political elite.
So if you are targeting a specific audience - for example, writing for Android developers or, in my case, beginner and experienced architects - you can expect good monetization even with relatively low traffic.
Monetization mechanisms
I tested several monetization mechanisms. I share their results.
Native monetization of the blog platform. Sharing my experience with Medium... Each reader or author can buy a paid account for $ 5 and read all articles on the platform. The reader likes the articles he likes - on Medium it is called "clap". The money that the reader paid for a subscription is distributed among the authors of the articles he likes. The best authors can make good money. At the end of the month, Medium sends all authors a newsletter that reveals top earnings figures. In May 2020, the numbers looked like this: the best author received $ 25,000 per month from all his articles, and for the best article they paid more than $ 10,000. I received $ 50 per month for one of the articles - it was published 8 months before i tested the tool.
Screenshot with information about how much I earned on one of my articles
The disadvantage of this format is that the article is available only to those who have a subscription. This did not suit me, so I looked into other options.
Affiliated links. You become a member of the so-called "affiliate program" and post affiliate links in your article. If a reader clicks on such a link and buys a product, you get a percentage of the sale.
Many software products and stores have affiliate programs - a list of available programs is published on HubSpot: from Coursera to Amazon. I chose the latter: in every article I have, there are a couple of links to books on architecture. If someone buys them on my recommendation, Amazon will donate a certain percentage to me. The mechanics are simple: if you are writing useful content for your audience, the right affiliate program can make you rich. Links in my articles still generate an average of $ 100 to $ 150 every month - even though I wrote the last article almost a year ago (but I promise to fix it and start writing again!).
My income in the Amazon affiliate program for October 2019 The
disadvantage of this approach is that it is impossible to withdraw money from Amazon to the cards of Russian banks. I lived in the Netherlands, so I had no problems with a bank account and money withdrawal.
Affiliate programs are the most profitable and proven way to monetize. They can bring in thousands of dollars a month - as long as you write constantly. Cases confirm: one author made a link invitation to Uber drivers when the aggregator was just beginning its expansion and earned $ 50,000, while another wrote an article about Instagram bots on Medium and earned $ 2,000.
Referral invitations. If you work in IT, chances are your company has bonuses for inviting employees to the company. Typically, bonuses range from several hundred to several thousand dollars. For example, if you write complex and interesting things on Android, the people who read you probably want to work with you or on your team and can get a job through you.
This monetization method is the most volatile and time-consuming. You will have to independently filter people and review the resume before the recommendation, as well as present the company and tell about the conditions to a potential candidate. Of course, at some point you can hit the jackpot by making a few successful referrals, but the company can stop hiring at any time, and your income will be "frozen".
Marketing posts. If you run a popular blog on a certain topic, companies will want to publish marketing posts for you for money or do internal integrations, since their target audience is concentrated on your blog.
For example, you write about everything related to Devops, and the company is opening new paid courses in this area. They may very well want to buy integrated native ads on your blog. Personally, I have not tried such monetization, but I received offers.
Bonuses from the company. Many companies have bonus programs for writing articles. It can be either cash bonuses or their alternatives - mobile devices, tickets to foreign conferences or cool unique merchandise.
Perhaps if I wrote more articles, I would be making a couple of thousand dollars a month from my blog. So far, over the entire period of its existence - since 2017 - the blog has brought me about $ 5,000 through various monetization formats. With this money, I bought myself a watch, which I already mentioned at the beginning of the article. A nice bonus - especially considering that I did not seriously engage in blogging and promotion, but only wanted to study this direction.
Article length, tags and three more life hacks
In the process of writing articles for the blog, I found a few life hacks for myself. Perhaps they will be useful to you.
Better to finalize the article than to release it raw. It sounds like a captain, but sometimes I had to modify an article already published. This approach destroys your credibility in the eyes of your readers and leads to less traffic. In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn describes the rule of the last few inches: when 95% of the work is finished, nothing remains, but these 5% of the work are the most difficult from the point of view of motivation and the most important from the point of view of the reader's convenience. Always finish the article to the end, even if it seems to you that it will do anyway - otherwise why is this all?
The optimal length of one article is 7 minutes. These are the statistics of Medium... It takes 7 minutes to read the top rated articles on the platform. Of course, this is not a universal number. In my opinion, the best timing is 6 to 10 minutes. There is enough content in such an article to fully cover the topic, but it is not difficult to read it in one go. Much also depends on the site: somewhere the optimal post length is 3 minutes, and somewhere - perhaps all 30 minutes.
Use tags. Almost all blogging platforms offer to add tags. Set them to the maximum and target the audience for which you are writing. This will allow readers to find your article faster.
Submit your article on Thursday or Saturday morning. According to statistics , these days the number of views is 33% more than on others. The worst day to post is Monday.
Use keywords for search optimization. Keywords will help bring your article and blog to the top if you publish text on your site.
Life hacks are good, but content is still the main reason a person will read your article. If the content is decent, then it doesn't matter what time you publish the article and how many characters it will contain.
Instead of conclusions, or what's next
And then, most likely, you need to write more. Because building a good tech blog is a long process. It is too early to sum up this venture after the first published article, and even more so, you should not compare yourself with those who have been writing for a long time. is at the end of this path.
Try to publish at least five articles, and then evaluate the first intermediate results: have you become better at formulating thoughts, is the number of readers growing, have you got more readers, have you got regular readers.
And beware of the Impostor Syndrome: it can influence your motivation, tell you that it is not yours, but without mistakes there are no victories, and without trial there is no success.
At the start, come up with topics for several articles at once. This will make it easier for you to stay motivated and not abandon your blog. Try to build a long-term strategy for the development of your blog. For example, I knew right away that I wanted to write a series of 8 articles on career development. And he clearly indicated to the readers in the first article that there would be a continuation - in the first article. Thus, I prepared the audience for the fact that I will publish more content that is interesting to them, and myself to the fact that it will not be so easy to jump off - after all, I promised readers new articles. This is how people can become your regular readers.
This is the largest article I've ever written. I really hope that I opened the topic and motivated you to start writing. It's a long journey, but worth it. Write it right now!
useful links
- Grammarly is a service for checking texts in English.
- Glavred is a service for checking the text in Russian.
- Spelling - a service for checking spelling, punctuation and stylistics.
- Advego is a style checking service.
- “Write, Shorten” by Maxim Ilyakhov and Lyudmila Saracheva is the best book in Russian for those who want to write clear and concise texts.
- “A text that sells a product, a service or a brand” by Anna Shust is another book discovery that will help improve your writing skills.
- "The Million Dollar Blog" - the book of the renowned expert in digital marketing Natasha Courtney-Smith.