When you have a company blog, keeping up with your content can be a pretty time-consuming feat. Consistently developing useful content becomes even more challenging when you’re producing content for technical industries, which brings us to the main point of this article, how to write a blog post for complex or technical industries.
With sophisticated and technical blogging, you need to be well-researched in technically-driven topics. In most cases, more technically-inclined blog posts tend to be tedious to research as well as write.
It might sound obvious, but if you want to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to ensure you’re writing high-quality content on a regular basis.
The best thing you can do is to make sure you’re sustaining and growing your audience is to develop a template that you can follow to quickly and easily create the ideal blog post.
Once you’ve prepared and honed your approach with a blueprint to create blog posts, you’ll find that it becomes more habitual. You’ll be able to focus more on the content aspect of blogging, and less on the logistics.
In this article, we will help you do just that. You will have the ability to create your customized template to quickly and easily develop technical and complex blog posts for your enterprise website. Furthermore, we’ll look at some processes and strategies for producing blog posts that are complex and technical topics that your team struggles the most writing.
Article Contents
It’s Not Just About Finding a Great Writer
Let’s face it, finding an SEO-friendly blog writer that knows your blogging niche and who can write extremely high-quality content is challenging. Even if you do hire a writer that looks good on a resume, knowing that they’ll hit your projected deadlines and create quality content, every time, can be extremely difficult.
For starters, let’s look at a process to get you started. This process will make the process of writing technical blog posts a bit more straightforward.
A Process to Make Technical Writing More Simple
Clear communication is central to any successful business and complex or technical blog posts are no exception. A technical blog is a powerful inbound marketing vessel.
Here are four pieces of advice to help you write about technical or complex subjects in a relatable, “plain English” sort of way.
1. Write for a “Teenage” Persona
But, aren’t you supposed to write for your ideal audience?
The answer: Yes and no.
Start by simply considering your business.
Let’s say you are writing blog posts about a coding language. In this example, let’s use PHP because your business relies on this technology to function.
If your blog post is complex and highly technical, then there is a high likelihood that whoever is reading it is also a person with a technical background. If they’re interested in buying what you’re selling (and are not running the company), they would not likely feel uncomfortable forwarding it on to their non-technical boss.
While the blog post was fascinating, it’s not something he can use to convince his boss that he needs to buy what you’re selling.
In that case, even though you wrote for your audience (a developer), your blog post failed to do what it was ultimately supposed to do. You are no closer to selling your product or service than you were before.
Instead, why not try a different strategy. We recommend instead that you write for a technically-savvy teenager. This person is in high school. Growing up in today’s day and age he/she has not only been exposed to modern day technology but some higher-level language, too. However, he/she still benefits from simplified explanations to fully grasp concepts.
When they are asked to read a textbook that is too complex, he might frustrated–and shut themselves off, ceasing to learn. Keep it simple!
2. Organize + Link for Simplicity
Remember, your reader is a teenager, he has a short attention span.
Keep the information bite-sized and break and organize big topics down into sections or, depending on the amount of information, consider writing a power post and break the content down into “chapters” or sections on the page.
For example, let’s say you’re writing a piece on cloud-based software. The information at your disposal goes into great detail about the evolution of the cloud. However, you attempted to put everything into a regular blog post, but it’s becoming difficult to format.
Try to determine how you can take an in-depth subject and break it down into several digestible chunks or chapters.
To squeeze as much as you can out of your topics without having to provide every single detail explicitly you could also link to related posts. You can do this contextually by hyperlinking text in a sentence. Linking to other posts that you wrote AND linking to posts that other people have written on a topic is fantastic for your SEO (search engine optimization).
3. Use Analogies & Real-World Examples
When you are presenting technical or complex material in your blog, use examples that people can relate to. It will help drive home the information or the point you’re trying to make.
Another excellent writing tool for blogs is the analogy. An analogy is a comparison between two things – it explains a concept in terms that your readers will understand.
A good analogy can help your readers see something in a new way:
“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Do your best to create analogies between the subject you are writing about and an everyday thing your ideal audience can relate to. If you consider this and implement it into your complex subject matter, you will help your reader understand that much better.
4. Format for Easy Reading
You and I both know that in reality, most people tend to skim blogs much more than they read them word for word.
Here’s a pro tip as it relates to creating complex/technical content that more readers can connect with:
Since we know that most of your site visitors do not usually read everything, format your posts to facilitate skimming. Do everything in your power to make your main points stand out visually!
Your headline and subheadings should tell a compelling story in and of themselves, but they should also encourage the reader to read the content underneath the headers.
Blog Post Formatting Tips:
- Use bullets and numbers to make individual points and give step-by-step instructions.
- Keep paragraphs short to make the content easier to read.
- Indent sections of your blog post to call them out as necessary.
- To keep things simple, your headline can be a question with each sub-headline an answer.
5 Benefits to Publishing Highly Complex and Technical Blog Posts
You might be asking, “Is it even worth the trouble of writing regular complex, technical blog posts?” “Do the benefits warrant the challenge of producing this type of content?”
Yes! There are many benefits to publishing highly complex and technical blog posts. Let’s take a look at five benefits of regularly publishing content even though you might be in a specialized industry.
#1 Attract Qualified B2B Traffic and Leads
When you publish high-quality complex and technical blog posts to your website on a regular basis, you increase your likelihood of attracting qualified B2B traffic and qualified leads.
Not only will you become a better, more robust resource for companies interested in your niche, but you will also put yourself in a position of ranking much higher in Google search results. When you are writing rich, high-quality technical content and simultaneously targeting competitive keywords, you are creating content that Google can index as well as resources that others will want to link to. This content increases your visibility as well as your chances of attracting qualified B2B traffic.
#2 You Can Establish Yourself as a Thought leader in Your Industry
An additional benefit to publishing technical and complex topic-focused blog posts is that you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Over time, as you create and expand your collection of this type of technical content, you will likely generate trust among your website visitors while simultaneously increasing the number of visitors to your website.
Accurate, high-quality content combined with consistency will, over time, nearly guarantee you become seen as a respected thought leader in your particular industry.
#3 They Give you a Consistent Brand Voice
One sure-fire way to develop an authentic brand voice is to publish blog content regularly. Over time, you become the go-to for your particular niche within your industry. One way to set yourself apart from your competition is not just high-quality complex and technical content, but more importantly regular, consistent top-notch content.
It isn’t enough to write an occasional post and expect your desired results, you must develop a consistent brand voice, and this takes time, energy, and dedication.
#4 Re-Define Your Lead Generation and Conversion Techniques
An additional benefit taking the initiative to see that complex and technical content blog posts are created regularly on your company’s site is that you can re-define both your lead generation and conversion techniques.
With consistent, quality technical blog content you can create content for every stage of the buyer’s journey and guide them from a casual visitor to a buying customer. If this sounds foreign to you, we encourage you to read our article on the stages of the buyer’s journey. You will better understand the power of how top-of-the-line content can dramatically boost your lead generation and ability to convert leads to clients.
#5 Boost Your Revenue and Achieve Consistent Growth
Finally, when you are regularly publishing content that is highly specialized in a couple of specific topics within your industry, you will over time boost the number of visitors at your site. By having an increasing number of new website visitors, you give yourself the chance to increase your company’s revenue and achieve consistent growth.
We need to mention here that to convert these new website visitors to leads you need to ensure you also have content offers that is related to the topics of your blog content. The website visitors might call you or use your website contact form but the best method to increase the number of new leads is also generating various conversion points on your website.
How to Write a Blog Post for Technical Industries
Most people think that the actual process of writing blog posts for technical industries is hard… but it doesn’t have to be.
Today, we’ll show you the exact step-by-step process on how you can create quality blog posts for technical and other complex industries.
With many highly technical topics, in today’s day and age, research can only get you so far.
To generate accurate blog posts on complex areas, we don’t waste time. Instead, we go straight to the source–the client’s primary technician–and conduct an in-depth interview on the subject matter.
We then take this very valuable interview, transcribe it, and organize its content into a structured outline for our copywriters to turn into an online resource.
For an in-depth look at how you can generate technical blog posts based around a recorded interview, check out our post on How to Write an Ebook (without writing a single word).
Let’s take a look at a step-by-step process for technical content development.
Step by Step Process for Technical Content Development
Competitor Research
First, with the subject for your blog post and central topic for your interview with your client in mind, do some competitor research. Learn a bit about who your client is trying to outdo on a day-to-day basis. What are they doing differently? What similarities do they share? Take note of these qualities.
By being prepared and knowledgeable, you will come off as more competent, and the interviewee will naturally be more apt to open up to you and share all that they know about the topic at hand.
Keyword Research
Next, for SEO purposes, you want to define 1-3 core keywords that you would want to center your blog post around. Use any keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz, or Ahrefs to do this. You want to find keywords that have a reasonably high search volume with a low amount of competition.
Interview Question Prep
Now, you will want to outline your interview with the type of questions that will lead to robust explanations that you can include when writing your article. To develop a list of interview questions research variations of your top 3 keywords and analyze the search results. By researching your keywords and reviewing the numerous resources, you educate yourself on the subject at hand and then, in turn, produce a series of interview questions.
The number of questions is up to you and length of the article you would like to create, but bear in mind that your client’s time is valuable, so keep it concise and to the point!
Conduct the Interview
Next, comes the interview itself. While this sounds simple enough, here are a few tips to bear in mind when you’re one-on-one with the client.
Record the Interview!
You want to make sure that you can focus on understanding what the interviewee has to say and coming up with follow-up questions. You do not want to occupy yourself with frantically writing and taking notes.
Ask Follow up Questions When Necessary
To respect your client’s time, stick to the prepared questions, but don’t shy away from an opportunity to ask expansive, follow-up questions should the opportunity arise.
This will help to enrich your content and give you more to work with when you sit down to write your technical blog post.
Transcribe Interview
This step is pretty straightforward, but an essential one–transcribe your recorded interview! You can do this with a myriad of different companies that charge very reasonable, by the minute, pricing. By having a word-for-word breakdown of your interview, you will be able to more accurately (and quickly) create your technical blog post.
Outline Blog Post
Once you have a fully transcribed interview, you are now ready to break it down into a well-organized outline. Keep in mind the tips from the earlier section on making your blog post more simple. Avoid overly long sections and make sure to format with both “skimmers” and readers in mind.
Get Expert Feedback
With the outline in hand, you should consider running it by your client for a final review before you get into the nitty-gritty of writing your technical blog post. By getting an expert review, you will give both yourself and the client full confidence that you have everything you need to craft a quality technical article.
Write Blog Post
And, finally, you will, of course, write your blog post. By now, you have everything at your disposal to successfully write a technical blog post. You understand the client, his competitors, his industry, and (at least somewhat) the topic at hand. You are also highly organized with your outline and have all of the core content at your fingertips. All you need to do now is to give it a writer’s touch and voilá; you have your technical blog post complete.
Additional Support in Technical Writing
If you’re looking for additional support in your content production look for a partner that can help you consistently deliver quality content.
Our team makes it easy for you to get the industry-specific blog posts you need, so you can focus on other priorities while your content production happens consistently, without a drop in quality.
Request a free consultation to discover how we can keep your content production engine going and growing.
Vanessa
