How to Write and Monetize a Technical Blog?

I have been working in development since 2011. Since the end of 2012, I have been developing for iOS. I wrote my first technical article in Russian about a localization approach for the mobile apps on Habr in early 2017. Then I published several more articles on iOS development on Habr, and at the end of 2017, I moved to a new company and decided to write about solution architecture, where I began to describe general concepts, architect’s responsibilities, and skill-set, etc. By the summer of 2020, the number of views of my articles exceeded 800k, and the total time people spent reading it was more than 6 million minutes or about 12 years. The key article was translated by other people into different languages: for example, Polish and Spanish.

Here I will describe how I write my technical blog — from coming up with new ideas to having regular publications. I’ll share my thoughts on the topics you can write about, how to write and edit articles, as well as how to make money from them. For example, I bought a watch for the money that the blog earned me. This article will be equally interesting and useful for those who are only thinking about writing articles, and those, who are already actively writing.

Backstory

Back in 2016, I became interested in a career in solution architecture. At the beginning of 2017, I visited the first three-day intensive training in my life, where an experienced architect spoke about the basic concepts. Towards the end of the training, the participants were asked to get into teams that were supposed to take the proposed problem, come up with an architectural solution for it, and defend it against other teams. Honestly, I didn’t do very well then. By then I had worked as a team leader for several years, and only when I moved to another company and found out that there is a separate career development way —solution architects. To achieve this, I had to work on my project as an architect and get assessed by a committee of experienced architects. The committee rated my exam positively only the second time, six months after the first attempt. The total admission to this position in the company was only about 25%.

And at the end of 2017, when I began to informally perform duties of an architect on a large project, I simultaneously started a blog in which described my career growth in the field. Writing was a way to figure it all out myself, as well as to help others who are in a similar situation and are thinking about where to go after the team-lead position, apart from going into management. This was my main motivation why I started to write a blog. Let’s see what other reasons one can have.

Why keep a tech blog

I often hear a question: “Why do I need a blog?” Here are just a few reasons — and they are relevant not only for the IT sector.

• Expand your knowledge. If you are interested in a topic and you want to understand it better — write an article. This way you can improve your existing knowledge and structure it. I started the blog because I wanted to enhance my knowledge in the field of a software architect work.
• To grow a personal brand. Even as a developer, you are part of the community. If you are known in the community, it will be easier for you to find a new dream job, get promoted, increase income, and gain respect of other professionals from your field. And, also, developing your personal brand competently, you can become a so-called “influencer” — that is, a specialist whose opinion is valuable to other community. One of the striking examples is the story of the guys from Rambler. In 2016, they managed to recommend VIPER as the best architecture for the presentation layer on iOS and an alternative to the more classic MVC and MVVM among the Russian iOS community. They did it all by making clear presentations and writing comprehensive articles. A lot of companies and developers have tried VIPER, and some are still using it.
• To promote the company. Creating a personal brand is always closely intertwined with the strengthening of your company’s brand. This is a win-win situation: you help attract the best personnel, set a good example for your colleagues, talk about the product, and useful insights in the market and the company encourages you in one way or another. We, at Cardsmobile, are now working actively towards strengthening the HR brand in the market and, perhaps, my articles will help motivate my colleagues from the team to share their knowledge, write articles, and make public talks.
  Of course, it is important that the management of the company also recognizes the value of such initiative and encourages its employees in this direction.
• To earn money. Most start a blog to earn money. This is a common reason for starting blogs in travel or beauty industries, but, paradoxically, in the IT sector one rarely goes into blogging for money. However, opportunities here do exist: I bought a watch for the money that the blog earned me — having said that, making a profit of it wasn’t my goal.

What to write about

The question that everyone confronts at the start is: “What to write about?” Most often, the topic for articles is suggested by the very reason you decided to start a blog. If you’ve decided to enhance your knowledge — write articles about what you want to understand and figure out. If you’ve decided to strengthen the company’s brand and your own brand, tell the reader about your work, projects, and applied technologies. As for myself, I identified the following subjects:

• Reviews. Came across a new technology — try to explain it in the “A to Z” format. Find out what they are talking about at professional conferences, what is a trend today. Almost everything new has great potential for research and deep immersion into the subject. Reviews of books that you’ve read are also good.
• Cases. Did something interesting — write about it. A common mistake is the feeling that you are not doing anything interesting. Often the opposite is true. Look at your work not from the inside, but outside, and fight the impostor syndrome.
  Working with a heavily loaded back-end — tell us how you make a high load and why you are doing it this way. Developing UI — tell us about an interesting animation that you made. Used a new technology in the project — tell us about your experience with it. Discussing your pitfalls and sharing your insights will help others avoid looking for the solution for hours.
• Guides. Take some kind of a problem and try to solve it. Describe the solution in detail — you get a kind of a guide for those who face a similar problem.
• Analytical notes. Form your own opinion on a new technology or a problem that is the market’s primary concern. To clarify, this format is more suitable for influencers who already have an audience and whose opinion matters to the community.
• Articles with a sense of humor. Take a serious topic and talk about it in a light manner. The audience likes it.

A couple of tips on topic research:

• Note questions from colleagues. Most companies have things that will be of interest to the whole community. It is not difficult to find such topics: analyze what processes and technologies provoke most questions from the beginners — write about this.
• Read news and know your trends. This is an endless stream of new topics for your blog. By preparing an article about a piece of news or a trend, you kill two birds with one stone: you improve your own knowledge on the subject and save time for other community members by collecting information for them.
• Read comments to other people’s articles. This is a storehouse of information that interests and moves other people. Remember that the number of unique and brilliant ideas, as a rule, is little. One way or another, everything has been already invented by someone. Nevertheless, this is not a reason not to write, because there are very few well-written comprehensive texts. My advice: just write, and over time you will learn how to quickly find interesting topics for your blog.

How to write a good article

• Share unique content. The main rule of a 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 — publishing non-authentic content is prohibited. It may also mean a ban.
• Make a plan. An interesting and clear article begins with a plan and structuring of the main points. Mind maps help me construct a good outline for the article. The mind map for this article was rather small, yet sometimes I come up with quite extensive ones. Below is the mind map I put together to tweet about my experience living in the Netherlands in Russian.
  Make the plan as detailed as possible. Try to highlight all the main ideas that you want to reveal in the article.

Mind map for Tweeter posts about my experience living in the Netherlands.

• Stick to the structure. Make it easier for the reader to navigate through the article, and use the traditional structure consisting of an introduction, main part, and conclusion.

— Introduction. The introduction should capture the readers’ attention and motivate them to immerse into the text. Write what the article will be about and what helpful material your text entails. Clearly indicate the target audience for whom the article was intended.

— Main part. Here reveal the main idea and give answers to the questions posed in the introduction. Be considerate of the reader and simplify navigation through the article: use headings and subheadings, different fonts (bold and italics to highlight headings and important fragments of text), split the text into paragraphs, and make lists. Trudging through a continuous body of the text is difficult and uninteresting, while these simple tricks will help increase its readability.

— Summary or conclusions. At the end of the article, briefly reiterate the main ideas that you revealed in the text. It will help clarify all the points in the mind of the reader — or you might as well leave room for thought. You can also add useful links on the topic at the end of the article so that the readers who became interested in the topic can study it further.

• Write as you speak. Be yourself — write the way you speak in your everyday life and avoid using complex syntactical structures. At the same time, the text should be well-thought-out, without any filler words and other verbal garbage.
• Come up with a meaningful headline. There is no magic in choosing perfect wording or coming up with the heading length. Formulate the title so that it reveals the content of the article and helps the reader to make the choice: to read or not to read. In some cases catchy and intriguing headlines work very well — they literally catch attention, but it is important that the content of the article meets the expectations of the reader. It is also advisable to study the search engine results in order to understand which topics are searched most often. Always choose a headline after you have finished writing up the content of the article — so that it turns out as relevant as possible.
• Do not forget about the pictures. Can’t do without them — reading a bare text with no pictures is boring. Choose images that are meaningful or that are funny, ones that add a little lightness to a serious topic.

A special mention goes to the main image below the heading of the article — it’s a teaser (from the English to tease: “to make fun of or attempt to provoke in a playful way”). The word speaks for the reason an image to be selected: it should summon the reader to open the link. This is important because the first thing a person notices is the picture. Striking visual content is bound to attract more attention and transitions. If possible, write the name of the author and the name of the company on the picture — this way this information becomes more noticeable and eye-catching.

Sharing posts on Medium

I choose pictures for my articles from the Monument Valley game. I subconsciously associate it with architecture and complex design and, in my opinion; the images are well suited for the main heading. And in general, it’s a very cool game — I recommend it.

• Check the content. I do not publish the article as soon as I write it. I have a ritual that I strictly observe — I review the text in several stages.
• Check spelling, punctuation, and style. I advise you to use specialized digital tools, such as Grammarly.
• Editing by reviewers. I have several good reviewers in the areas I write about — from iOS development to architecture — they are experts in the field whose opinion I trust. They are well versed in the topic and can give comments on the content: in iOS — it’s a developer of the biggest Russian social network VK, a good friend of mine from St. Petersburg, and in architecture — an architect from Google in Silicon Valley. If you have no such experts around, show the article to your supervisor or colleagues. Large companies, where the content production is rather similar to an assembly line process, collaborate with external reviewers.
• Proofreading of the text by a technical writer. I always send texts written in foreign languages to relevant native speakers. They help with the wording and make the whole article sound better. I send technical texts to friends who are technical writers.

As a result, the article goes through approval stages not only by me but also by professional reviewers — which means that such content can be trusted.

Where to publish the article: choosing a platform

If the company has its own blog, that’s where you can start. If not, there are two options: existing sites or a blog on your domain. There are many blog platforms: Habr is popular among the Russian-speaking audience, and Medium is popular among the English-speaking audience. There are also many platforms for creating your own blog. Each approach has its pros and cons.

Popular platform

+ Platform with a strong SEO is the reason why readers would find your article. This reduces the costs, both in terms of time and money, of promoting a blog. At the same time, platforms generate traffic not only for new articles: I have not written anything new since last August, but each month my articles receive about 25k views.

+ Ready-made UI simplifies the layout of articles. The platforms offer user-friendly editors that integrate a variety of templates and mechanics. In Medium, for example, there is a feature with automatic calculation of the time it takes a reader to go through an article. Articles are also convenient to read: the editors, by default, include “air” in the text, as well as a choice of fonts, headings, as well as easy picture editing, and much more.

+ Simple launch. Working on the article goes according to a simple scenario: writing -> publishing.

- Basic customization of style. If you want a complicated layout or custom features, this option will not work.

- The need to accept all the rules of the blog platform. There can be legal nuances, and you may also be banned for the rules violation, which will lead to a complete loss of the blog. Privacy issues: for example, you cannot publish private correspondence or make a full copy of an article from another site. Such things seem obvious, but it’s better to read the rules of the platform before you do anything else.

- Dependence on the demand of the site. If the service is losing popularity, then your blog is losing popularity too.

Keeping a blog on your own domain

The advantages of popular platforms are the disadvantages of your domain. And the disadvantages of the common platforms are the advantages of your own sites. You can customize the blog as you like, but at the start, a lot of resources need to be invested. In addition, your own site requires a large budget and promotion activities, as well as generation and retention of traffic, while blog platforms generate traffic for you themselves. If you still want to have your own domain, some sites allow setting up your own domain name and publish articles under it — this option is available, for example, on Medium.

Having considered all the pros and cons of both options, I started blogs on two platforms: Habr and Medium.

How to promote your article

If you decided to start a blog on any given platform, the traffic generated by the platform itself will be available to you by default. Promoting a blog on your own domain, it makes sense to employ an SEO specialist. There are other promotion formats that can attract readers — regardless of the platform on which you are based. Below I’ll share ways that particularly helped me.

• Send the link to your friends. They are the most loyal of audiences. It is highly likely that they will read your article and ‘like’ it. Friends’ activity can help surge into the daily top, which, in turn, will generate more traffic from the site.
• Post the link on all social networks. Even if you don’t have an active social media presence and don’t have a lot of followers yet, the posts that do appear would still generate a certain number of views — this is good enough at the start. Linkedin works best for me — that’s where I have more than 3k contacts, mainly English-speaking. Yet, Instagram, in my opinion, doesn’t work for IT bloggers at all.
• Send the link to influencers. It can be bloggers, public pages, and portals that cover topics similar to yours. Perhaps your article will be added to a newsletter or published in the feed. I was once published in a group on Telegram messenger channel with a couple of thousands of active readers.
• Make presentations. Participation in conferences strengthens your personal brand among other obvious benefits. You can share a blog link with your audience and thereby increase its organic reach. This is not an intrusive advertisement: your audience, by default, is interested in the subject you are talking and writing about, and so you naturally offer them more useful content.

All these tools will help you become an expert in your field and become known in the community. I do not consider myself an influential expert in software architecture, yet my blog has a regular audience and it generates new useful contacts. Below are a few posts from Linkedin that have grown into interesting conversations.

Screenshots of messages in LinkedIn

I have a motivating story from a past job. EPAM is a big company, and even as an architect you may never meet CTO. But it happened to me: when we met for the first time, he noted that he had read my blog and liked my articles.

How to monetize a 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 — in case you are writing on behalf of your company, and with the rules of the site on which you are planning to publish. The points regarding monetization most often are clearly defined. Knowing them, you can avoid negative consequences: for example, getting banned and losing your blog.

Types of Monetization

There are two types of monetization.

• Direct. You get money directly for writing an article.
• Indirect. You do not receive money directly for writing an article, but your income is still growing. It works like that. For example, you speak at conferences for money. Your blog with quality articles increases your fame and expertise in the community, and you can increase the price of conference appearances. Another scenario is possible: if you are developing a paid product, mention it in the articles — this can stimulate sales. It is possible to “monetize” you as a specialist: the image of an expert affects the wages and probability of employment in cool companies. Indirect monetization is too voluminous of a direction, so I will not consider this topic in detail in this article and focus on direct monetization, on tangible financial flows. In direct monetization, the key metric is incoming traffic, or rather, the number of views and reads of the article. The number of reads increases revenue and generates the main cash flow. Roughly speaking, if you double your incoming traffic, then there’s a high probability your income will also double. An important aspect is the orientation (targeting) of the audience. I will explain with an example of a blog about British politics. The traffic on this site was very small, so the author set low advertising prices. But once the author was informed that the British Prime Minister was reading his blog, and he realized that he could push up the price of advertising, as the country’s political elite read the blog. So if you are targeting a specific audience — for example, writing for Android developers or, as in my case, beginner and experienced architects — you can count on good monetization even with relatively low traffic.

Monetization mechanisms

I tested several monetization mechanisms. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Native monetization of a blog platform. I’ll share my experience with Medium. Each reader or author can buy a paid account for $5 and read all articles on the platform. The articles the reader likes are ‘liked’ — on Medium this is called “cotton”. The money that the reader pays for the subscription is distributed among the authors of the articles he liked. The best authors can get good money. At the end of the month, Medium sends a mailing list to all authors, in which it discloses top income figures. In May 2020, the numbers looked like this: the best author received $25,000 per month from all of his articles, while for one of the articles he was paid more than $10,000. I received $50 for one of the articles — it was published 8 months before I started using the tool.

Screenshot of the 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 explored other options.

Affiliate links. You become a member of the so-called “affiliate program” and post affiliate links in your article. If the reader follows it and buys the goods, you get a certain percentage of the sale. Many software products and stores have affiliate programs — a list of available programs has been published on HubSpot: from Coursera to Amazon. I chose the latter: in each of my articles, there are a couple of links to books on architecture. If someone buys them on my recommendation, Amazon transfers me a certain percentage. The mechanics are simple: if you write useful content for your audience, a properly selected affiliate program can make you rich. Links in my articles still generate an average of $100–150 every month — even taking into account the fact that I wrote the last article almost a year ago (but I promise to get back on track and start writing again!).

My income in the Amazon affiliate program as of October 2019

The disadvantage of this method is that it is impossible to transfer money from Amazon to Russian bank accounts. I lived in the Netherlands, so I had no problems with a bank account and withdrawing money. You can make an account on PayPal and withdraw money through it. Affiliate programs are the most profitable and proven way to monetize. They can bring thousands of dollars every month, provided that you write constantly. Cases confirm: one author made a link invitation to Uber drivers when the aggregator was just starting its expansion and earned $50.000, while another one wrote articles about Instagram bots on Medium and earned $2000.

Referral invitations. If you work in IT, most likely your company has bonuses for inviting employees to the company. As a rule, bonuses range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. For example, if you write complex and interesting things about the Android, probably the people who read you want to work with you or in your team and can get into the company through you. This method of monetization is the most unstable and requires the most time. You will have to filter people and review the CVs before making the recommendation, as well as present the company and talk about the conditions to the potential candidate. Of course, at some point, you can hit the jackpot by making several successful referrals, but the company can suspend hiring at any time, and your income will “freeze”.

Marketing posts. If you run a popular blog on a specific topic, companies will want to publish marketing posts or internal integration for your money — because your target audience is concentrated on your blog. For example, you write about everything related to DevOps, and the company opens new paid courses in this area. It is possible they will want to buy integrated native advertising on your blog. Personally, I have not tried such method of monetization, but I have received offers.

Bonuses from the company. Many companies have bonus programs for writing articles. It can be either cash prizes or alternatives — mobile devices, tickets to foreign conferences, or cool unique merch items. Perhaps if I wrote more articles, I would earn a couple of thousand dollars a month on a blog. So far, for the entire time of its existence, i.e. since 2017, the blog has brought me about $5,000 through various formats of monetization. With this money I bought a watch, which I had 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 subject area.

Length of the article, tags, and three more life-hacks

In the process of writing articles for the blog, I found some life-hacks for myself. Perhaps they will be useful to you too. Better to finalize an article than to publish a raw one. It may sound daunting, but sometimes I had to modify an already published article. The downside of this is that belated editing affects your credibility in the eyes of the readers and leads to a decrease in traffic. A Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book “In the First Circle” describes the rule of the last steps: when 95% of the work is completed, nothing remains but the rest 5% and they are the most difficult in terms of self-motivation and are the most important in terms of reader convenience. Always finish working on the article until the end, even if it seems that “it will do”. Otherwise, what’s the reason for doing it all?

• The optimal length of an article is 7 minutes. This is the statistics of Medium. Meaning that reading articles with the highest rating on the platform takes 7 minutes. Of course, this is not a universal number. In my opinion, the best timing is from 6 to 10 minutes. This article has enough content to fully reveal the topic, but it is not difficult to read at a time. Much also depends on the site: somewhere, the optimal length of the post is 3 minutes, and somewhere, perhaps, up to 30 minutes.
• Use tags. Almost all blog platforms offer tagging. Put them to the maximum and focus on the audience for which you are writing. This will allow readers to find your article faster.
• Publish your article on Thursday or Saturday morning. According to statistics, the number of views is 33% higher on those days than on any other days of the week. The worst day to post is Monday.
• Use keywords to optimize your search. Keywords will help bring your article and blog to the top if you publish text on your site.

Life-hacks are good, but still, content is the main reason a person will read your article. If the content is decent, then it’s not so important when you publish the article and how many characters it may contain.

Instead of a conclusion, or what’s next

And then, most likely, you need to write more. Because writing a good tech blog is a long process. It’s too early to make any conclusions after publishing the first article, and even more so you should not compare yourself with those who have been writing for a long time — they are at the end of this journey. Don’t jump before you leap, so to speak. Try to publish at least five articles, and then evaluate your first interim results: 5 and look at the feedback. Is there an improvement, did you start writing and formulating your thoughts better, whether there is an increase in readership, whether you’ve got more readers, and whether you have acquired any regulars. And beware of the Impostor Syndrome: it may affect your motivation, and it may make you think that it is not your thing, but there are no victories without mistakes and without trials, there is no achievement.

At the start, come up with subjects for several articles at once. So it will be easier for you to maintain motivation and not to abandon the blog. Try to build a long-term development strategy for your blog. For example, I immediately realized that I wanted to write a series of 8 articles on the subject of career development. And I clearly indicated to the readers in the first article that there will be a sequel — in the very first article. Thus, I prepared the audience to wait for more content that they are interested in, and myself for the fact that it won’t be so easy to leave — because I promised readers a series of articles.

It turned into a long article in the end — the biggest article I have ever written. I really hope that I revealed the topic and motivated you to start writing. It’s a long way, but it’s worth it. Start writing one right now!

Useful links

• Grammarly — a service for checking texts
• “The Million Dollar Blog” — a book by Natasha Courtney-Smith, a renowned digital marketing expert.