By its nature, technical content may seem time-consuming to produce. You know that you don’t need a whole lot of time or expertise to churn out a blog post on a topic like “10 reasons why kittens are fantastic.” But creating quality technical content in areas like DevOps, programming, IT security and data science (to name some of the domains that we at Fixate know well) requires considerably more work.
That’s why it’s not uncommon to see technical eBooks, whitepapers and even just basic blog posts that take months to come to fruition – which is a problem for marketers and product teams because, by the time they have finally created their technical content, it is often no longer relevant to their current goals.
Fortunately, though, quality technical content doesn’t have to take forever to produce. At Fixate, we create technical content quite fast. Usually, we are ready to publish within just a few weeks of starting a project.
Here are our secrets for achieving those fast turnarounds while also producing high-quality, impactful technical content.
Have Topic Ideas on Hand
In many cases, the biggest delay in creating technical content is not the actual writing, but rather thinking up an idea to write about. Topic curation for technical articles, whitepapers and so on is difficult. At the same time, selecting the right topics is critical, because well-written technical content will not make an impact if it focuses on a topic that no one cares about.
That’s why we maintain running lists of technical content ideas across a range of different domains. Ask us to produce an article, tutorial or other content in an area like DevOps or cloud monitoring, for example, and we’ll have a set of relevant topic ideas at the ready.
Additionally, because most of our topic ideas are generated by our network of IT industry practitioners, they are topics that this audience actually cares about.
The bottom line: Think up topics before you need the content (or partner with someone who can curate topics for you in real time).
Don’t Be Overly Wordy
Technical audiences don’t measure the quality of content by counting words. They care about technical meatiness.
That’s why there is little correlation between the length of technical content and its effectiveness. A 3,000-word eBook might end up performing much better than one that is 10,000 words long if the shorter eBook gets to the point quickly and focuses on communicating information that readers actually care about – as opposed to telling stories or boring technical readers with fluff.
There is, however, a correlation between how many words you write and how long your content takes to produce. ‘More words’ means ‘more time.’ To produce technical content quickly, avoid adding words just for the sake of adding words, or to meet an arbitrary word-count goal.
Focus instead on making sure that what you produce offers the technical depth and relevance that your audience craves. A few lines of well-written code that demonstrate an idea will speak to developers or DevOps engineers much more effectively than several paragraphs of text that express the same idea.
Don’t Obsess Over SEO
SEO is important, and we always factor SEO best practices into our content strategy.
That said, one of the reasons why we produce technical content so quickly is because we don’t let SEO become a barrier. For technical audiences, in particular, perfecting your SEO strategy is less important than simply having quality technical content.
If you spend your time obsessing over SEO, you’ll struggle to produce your content quickly. Mainly because SEO is an art more than a science, an SEO obsession won’t often lead to better results.
Have Writers At the Ready
Perhaps the most common reason why technical content is hard for many teams to produce quickly is that they don’t have qualified writers on hand. The people with the expertise required to write about a given technical topic usually have other job responsibilities that take priority. It can take weeks or months before one of your company’s programmers or data engineers has time to write your blog post.
At Fixate, we solve this problem by working with a large network of practitioners who use the technologies that they write about on an everyday basis. We achieve fast turnarounds by drawing on this network to cover whichever topics our clients ask us to write about.
If you are a marketing team or product team, you probably don’t have a large team of practitioners at the ready to write your content. But you can partner with us and leverage our network. Not only is this approach more cost-effective than trying to write content in-house, but it will allow you to produce and publish technical content much more quickly.
Set Clear Goals From the Start
Sometimes, the delays in technical content production happen toward the end of the process, after the content has been written. If you went into the process with only a vague idea of what your goals are or how you would use the content, you are at risk of getting through topic curation and writing only to discover that you need to start over.
That’s why having a clear agenda and plan from the start is critical for executing quickly and efficiently on technical content. This, too, is something we at Fixate are always happy to help with. By drawing on our team’s deep expertise in the IT industry, as well as our years of experience in the technical content marketing business, we routinely help clients set a clear agenda for their content from the start, ensuring that it gets out the door quickly and makes the biggest impact among their target audience.
Conclusion
Quality technical content requires expertise,but it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. As long as you have the right strategy and content team at your disposal, you can produce any type of technical content in a matter of weeks.
We’re happy to prove it. Contact us anytime to learn more.