Last year, we decided to take our Tech Blog to www.medium.com. With a lot of hard work from our writers, we had more success than we hoped for, being featured in the ranking of Top 44 French Engineering Blogs published on Toucan Toco in partnership with the guriosity project, with Criteo ranking #1. We are still learning and growing our blog but we thought we share some first insights on how to tech blog. Here are our Engineers’ tips and tricks.
Finding inspiration.
Unarguably, the hardest part of writing a blog post is finding an idea and topic to write about. Our Engineers tend to write about technology trends they have recently used within Criteo, opensource projects they have contributed to, the research they have led or helped with as well as about their life, events, meetups, and other things they experience here.
Generally, the above can be a good source of inspiration. Think about your day to day work as an Engineer. Have you recently changed an approach to something or learned something new that can be shared and help others? What are the topics you come across in your network, that people talk about? Do you have something to say about it? Go for it!
Keep it short, but not too short: 7-minute reads work best for us.
There are many different opinions out there on how long a blog post should be. Writers advocating for bite-sized content and others, advocating for longer articles. So, we would say it depends. We try to stick to 7-minute reads to keep our readers focused but also ensuring we are getting the key findings across. This article, for example, is a 5-minute read. Judge for yourself 🙂
When there is a lot of technical content to digest, we consider starting a series, splitting the content into pieces. We also link to other resources such as our Github repository.
Structure your article.
Break your key messages into headings so if someone is skimming through your article, they will understand the context and eventually stick around longer! Make use of different structuring tools to break lengthy texts into sections. You can:
- Break sections with the help of headings and subheadings
- Use lists
- Play with fonts
- Illustrate, design, and more!
Use visuals to underline your message.
In technical articles, we often have the opportunity to underline our content with diagrams, graphs, pieces of code, and other tools to break up the text and help the reader process. We also use a company database of pictures of our employees, locations, events, etc. Moreover, we revert back to free databases. Mention your source to give these platforms the credit they deserve! We find Unsplash a great source for quality pictures. Or, for the more creative ones, play with Canva!
Make it accessible
Ensure your post can be read by everyone. We won’t replace an accessibility mooc, we will highlight some good practices important in this context.
Describe your images with “alternative text”
Using “alternative text” in your images will allow users with screen readers to understand what you are showing, along with readers with poor internet connectivity, or search engines looking to index your content. It’s a net win! (For descriptive images you should put an empty text, but still set the alt tag. Otherwise screen readers might read the image url, which is useless, and not a great user experience).
The texts of your links should be meaningful
The texts of your links should be meaningful because screen readers may be used to give the list of all the links in the page. If it goes “click here — link — link — click” it won’t be very useful. (Sure, it can be worked around if you manage to set a proper aria-label, but if you are aware of it, you probably already more than enough to produce accessible blog post).
Do 👉 The texts of your links should be meaningful
Don’t 👉 The texts of your links should be meaningful (source)
Use emojis, not emoticons 👌
This is because a screen reader will read “😄” as “smiling face” but will fail to properly render “🙂”. To find out more on that topic you may refer to this article dedicated to emoji and accessibility.
Do 👉 I love writing! 🙂
Don’t 👉 I love writing! 🙂
Structure your page with actual headings
Structure your page with actual headings (instead of just writing bold text). This conveys the page structure to screen readers.
Reference other publications.
Take some time for cross-referencing authors and experts that have covered similar research to boost their visibility. With a bit of luck, they will return the favor and you can tap into a community and start networking!
For example, besides talking to our writers, we have also taken other people’s research and insights into consideration and used Sashko Dubailo’s post on “How to write a great technical blog post” or Bell Beth Cooper’s work “16 Top Tips from Blogging Experts for Beginners”.
Of course, you can also use quotes that inspired you, like this one from Brian Clarke:
Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.
Seek input before publishing.
We publish our technical content across different media such as Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others so we want to make sure our content is not confidential.
During and after the writing process, we highly recommend partnering up with someone that represents your target audience. Make sure they understand your content and see if they have ideas you want to incorporate. Find co-authors if this is more like you.
Lastly, have someone with native level proofread your article for clarity and correctness.
Publish and promote your work.
Tags
You can use tags to categorize your blog post on Medium and increase the likeliness of being found and read. We use tags that correspond with our categories so the articles get featured in these categories but also across Medium.
Title and subtitles aka the preview
When you publish your article, you will be asked to add a short description, 140 letters. The title and subtitle are used on your publication homepage, in previews of your story on Medium, and on social media. Make it catchy so people click on it!
Self-promotion
You’ve written and published your article, maybe even via your company page? Let your network know. Post your achievement to your social and professional networks — within your organization and outside.
Make sure you are using the share friend link under settings on the top right on your article to enable unlimited and free access!
Of course, there is more to a successful article on Medium but we hope you are one step closer to publishing your first article! If you interested in the latest tech trends in advertising technology subscribe to our medium blog!
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