The second session of Hashnode facilitated by Omotola Shogunle. It was an awesome session she shared many useful tips and to us as the audience, she always got back to our questions and giving us tips on how to best start off. Here are some tips gained:
Choosing a target audience
- Write about areas you're passionate about, learning, or have expertise in. This influences your writing styles:
- Target audience could be beginners/ knowledgable or experts target effectively.
- Write a short sentence about why this is your target audience preferably at the beginning of your article. For Example, "writing out for beginners coz when I was starting out I didn't get a helpful article like this"
steps of choosing target audience
- Write what you're comfortable/ passionate about
- Level of expertise (beginners/ knowledgeable/ experts)
- Target audience hangout(dev community)- either Twitter, Reddit, Quora, or Hashnode.
Art of StoryTelling
It's a way of captivating the audience.
- Be relatable "People want to relate with fellow human"
- Use close to human analogies/ real-life. Use cases for your technical examples.
real-life objects/applications (beginner friendly) use images/illustrations/GIFs to help communicate and create engagement.
Writing Technicalities
Note that people are busy. Break it up into series or parts I, II, and make it:-
Short | Simple | Readable | Valuable
Optimize topic headlines: Influences the reason why people consider clicking your article Tools that will help curate the best heading depending on what you're writing about include headline-analyzer which helps analyze headlines. Make sure it matches what you're writing about. When you share an article the first sentences could encourage readers to click on it.
Actionable note: Ask your audience to engage with the article by giving a nudge to prompt the user at the end of each post i.e further reading, liking, sharing, or leaving a comment.
If you love this article you can read other articles I've written.
Understand how SEO works: focus more on a target audience to build organic traffic. Tools that can be used include keywords everywhere browser extension which searches relevant keywords for your post subheaders for your post and where to strategically place: subheaders/ openings/ keywords/ paragraphs
Technical writing takes practice and patience. Read more, expand your knowledge. Be generous to read other people's posts and engage with them.