This chapter covers
- The difficulties of—and opportunities in—reaching interested readers
- The critical characteristics of blog posts that readers open, read, share, and remember
- How popular blog posts from the past year exemplify these critical characteristics
The previous chapter presented ideas on what to write. Now let’s shift focus to what engineers and other technical readers want to read. A compelling topic is essential for getting that initial click. But what will compel people to actually read the complete article, consider it valuable, and hopefully even share it with their colleagues and peers across social media and virtual communities?
A captivating bug hunt article will vary dramatically from an article where a well-known industry expert roasts a highly hyped technology, or one that shares how a team implemented an industry-changing algorithm. That’s why this book provides in-depth analysis of these and other blog post patterns, sharing examples, characteristics, as well as specific dos and don’ts for writing your own blog posts in those patterns. We’ll launch into those pattern-specific deep dives in part 3 of this book.
But across patterns, several core characteristics are shared by the blog posts that stand out: the articles that engineers talk about and that ultimately become part of the industry’s knowledge base. That’s what we explore in this chapter.