When it comes to writing a good blog post (especially a good tech blog post), there’s a lot more that goes into it than you might think. You can’t just write a few paragraphs about your offering on your site and expect that it will get eyeballs and simultaneously convert to sales. Maybe you’ve tried that already and it didn’t work out as well as you had planned. Maybe you, like others, just want to put the blog on autopilot and have someone else run it for you.
That’s where we come in. We know that writing great tech blog posts isn’t always a walk in the park, and that’s why running software companies’ blogs has become one of our most requested services. That’s also why we’ve written around 500 blog posts to date since Hit Subscribe formed in May of 2017.
So what can a client expect from one of our blog posts? What processes and style guides do we adhere to? Well, that’s what I’ll tell you all about today!
Laying the Groundwork
There are two different ways that we lay the groundwork for blog posts:
Option 1: Some clients like to provide us with the topic, brief mission, and/or the keyword for the post. This is generally how we work with clients who want just the text of the post instead of our done-for-you-style blog posts (as discussed in option 2 below). Clients on our content-only plan fall into this category.
Option 2: We strategically research, plan, and schedule topics for you. This is a service we exclusively offer to clients who are on our turnkey package.
Topic Planning
If you’re on the turnkey package, we do keyword research for topics even before we begin to write posts for you. And we don’t just choose topics that sound good to us or that we feel like writing about. We carefully select topics to ensure that they’re either (1) aimed at increasing your organic traffic and/or (2) aimed at increasing engagement and social shares. (The latter are what we like to call pot-stirring posts.)
In most situations, it’s ideal to include a mix of posts that speak to buyers in all stages of the marketing funnel and draw in prospective buyers through different channels, like social share, feed readers, and organic search. Of course, this may vary a bit based on the goals that you have for your blog. But the mix is advisable for a majority of our clients. For each post we plan, we create a mission and purposefully write that post with its mission in mind.
The Writing Process Begins
A lot of clients come to us because they’re tired of the “marketing fluff” that their ideal audience would just roll their eyes and shrug at. We know that this can be a problem, especially with tech content. To combat this, all of our authors are software developers whose ideas will resonate with your product users. These authors have various areas of expertise, but they’re all knowledgeable thought leaders who write content that’s technically sound and relatable for your audience.
Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about the content of each blog post.
Introduction
Each post starts off with an introduction. And each introduction includes a sentence that tells the reader exactly what they’ll take away from the post. Your readers won’t be left guessing about the post content or whether they’re wasting their time by reading further. Posts with a strong introduction that grab readers’ attention can help keep them on your site longer, improving your time-on-page stats, which in turn makes Google favor you in the rankings.
Subheads
We include subheads in our posts for a variety of reasons. For starters, subheads help blog posts flow well, read intuitively, and keep readers focused on the content. We guarantee a high readability score on all of our posts. And including subheadings improves a post’s readability score. Many of our clients use Yoast, and the plugin’s readability score will be green if it comes from us. But regardless of whether or not you use Yoast on your blog, we’re keeping your readers in mind. We write blog posts that are easy for them to read.
Engaging Content
I’ve read a lot of tech blog posts since I started working with Hit Subscribe. And honestly, I’m amazed at how some of our authors can pique my interest and keep me engaged in a topic that I thought could be dry and boring (or one that I had known nothing about before). Our authors and editors work to make sure that our posts are easy and enjoyable for our clients’ audiences to read.
One of the reasons our blog posts can keep even a non-techie like me engaged is because our authors include examples from real life and analogies that both help to drive the point home and keep readers interested.
Our writers also include screenshots, diagrams, and code snippets where appropriate to assist in learning. These are especially necessary for our longer how-to posts that we like to call “skyscrapers”—posts that, at 2,500–2,800 words, are double our regularly sized posts and are meant to be the definitive resource on how to set something up using a particular tech.
Conclusion
Just like we make sure that each of our posts starts off with a strong introduction, we ensure that each post has a strong conclusion. Our conclusions focus on the key takeaways from the post and end with a call to action for the reader.
QA
Once our authors finish drafting their posts, they go through both editorial and a quality assurance check before they land in our clients’ hands or on their sites. We have a house style guide that we follow to ensure that your post meets high editorial standards.
Turnkey Package Specifics
For clients who are on our turnkey plan, we take several steps to further process your post and to prep them for publishing. One of those steps is to double check that your post is SEO friendly, including making sure that each post is properly optimized for its respective keyword. We also add a meta description, alt-tagged images, internal links, and good external links when appropriate. If our clients use Yoast, we make sure that the SEO reading is green for every post that we publish for them. And if they don’t use Yoast, they rest assured that their post has been properly optimized for SEO anyway.
After we properly optimize your post, we load it on your site and get it ready for publishing. This includes adding the appropriate author bio and loading images to your site. We format the post correctly and make sure that everything looks great in preview mode.
Finally, each Tuesday morning, we publish your new weekly post for you!
That’s a Wrap
I’ve given you an overview of what you can expect from one of our blog posts. And there’s probably more that goes into it than you originally thought. But this is what we love to do—and where we excel the most.
Interested in having us write for you? Apply to be a client today.