25 Ways to Make Your Technical Writing Blog More Popular

Making money on technical blogs is an inexact science. What works for one blog, fails in another. I’ve launched over 200 websites since 1998 (mostly ecommerce sites) and about 35 blogs (for a technical audience0. If your blog has a technical slant, for example, its target audience is technical writers, analysts, IT architects, or others technical areas, then experiment with these techniques to increase your traffic.

25 Ways to Increase Traffic to a Technical or Ultra Niche Blog

1. Monthly Interview – do a profile every month or a day in the life of your target audience. Rule #1, technical writer like to read about other technical writers.
2. Company Profile – same as above but focus on how the company developed, what it’s doing right AND mistakes it made. Rule #2, people like to read how others solved problems.
3. Product review – don’t do a short review. Aim for 1000 words. Look at this review of Camtasia Studio 8. This will live long in the Google index and generate more backlinks. Short reviews melt like dew in the morning sun.
4. Guest articles – do them and take them. I take guest articles all the time (send me text files, please not Word). Make sure these people have a brain, i.e. that they remember to share the buzz on their site, their twitter, their Facebook page, and maybe on other Social Media networks. I’m still amazed at people who take the effort to submit, write and publish an article but forget to promote it.
5. Be the Hub – make your site the hub for your niche. This means others in the field will flock here to see what’s happening, who’s been hired, rates, buzz, gossip – whatever rocks their boat. And it’s ok to throw in the odd joke to lighten things up. Don’t take yourself too serious.
6. Calendar – use Google Docs to get it up. Simple way to create high-traffic pages.
7. Add Photos – don’t be shy. Show us your mug! Take photos whenever you go to an event, conference or client. Let others into your world. Remember rule #1.
8. Use Creative Commons – share. Make it easy for others to get your message out there. Why don’t you share?
9. Setup a Newsletter – use Aweber, not Feedburner, if you are serious about making money & getting the news out. The money is in the list. Share useful information. No one cares about your cat’s dysentery.
10. Reach out to Other Bloggers – mention other bloggers, writers etc in your articles. Why? They might pop over and leave a comment or respond in their blog. Learn How to Comment on A Lists Blogger sites like Chris Brogans
11. Add Short Video – use YouTube to increase traffic, cross-links, and to establish yourself as an authority.
12. Offer Incredible PDFs – create PDFs of your best work, upload it to Slideshare and index it in your Sitemap. Why? Google indexes PDFs. Include links back to your site + you’ll see the page rank increase.
13. Create Unique Twitter Lists – create unique and interesting twitter lists. As Twitter has become a wall of noise, people use lists to share, aggregate, and curate information. Make your list as specialized as possible. Then link to the list, not your twitter page. See the difference? Twitter followers will go thru the roof!
14. Twollow – use this to follow others by keyword, e.g. follow those interested in video marketing. AND use it to un-follow deadbeats that don’t follow back.
15. Ejunkie – use this to sell digital goods, information products, online training, or ebooks. 100 times better than Clickbank. $5 per month. How can you go wrong?
16. Optimize Money Pages – log into Google Analytics. Find your top 10 posts. Go into each of these pages and fine-tune them over more. Add 1 product to each page. These are your MONEY pages. Start making money here.
17. Google Analytics – learn how Google Analytics works. ‘I know how it works’. No, you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article! Spend 5 hours here. Do split testing, setup reports, check entrance paths, bounce rates and duplicate headers. All the heavy-weights do this.
18. Contact Journalists – identify 5 journalists in your industry. Tell them what you write about and why they should read your blog, i.e. to give them material for their articles. See your PageRank shoot up if you connect with one high-profile journalist.
19. Create 2 Sitemaps – add an XML site for Google to read and a HTML one for the humanoids. Check this with Google Webmaster Tools.
20. Title tags – don’t do all the hard work and forget to add the correct title tags to each post. It takes 5 min to get this right but it’s worth the effort. Use SEO in a Box plugin to do this.
21. Google Webmaster Tools – like Google Analytics, spend 30 min in here every week and see how Google in indexing your blog. Look for duplicate headers (i.e. pages with the same title tags) as these lower your PageRank. Also check for crawl errors and others horrors.
22. Leverage Facebook – forget pigville and join groups, fan pages that compliment your business. Add useful comments, not just high fives. Say something that others have overlooked. Add videos, photos and RSS feeds to your pages.
23. Create a Publishing Process – saving the last til best, almost. Develop a workflow for publishing your material. Don’t just write and hit publish. Stand back and see how you can gather information, identify your audience, focus on pain points (i.e. their problems), develop content that will be evergreen, source photos, respond to comments, and get busy promoting. No one knows about your site.
24. Twitter Lists - Create twitter lists on technical writing. Add as many technical writers to the list as you can. Connect with these folks on Twitter, send them a @ or DM and let them know they are listed. This type of soft promotion works in the long run as it sends a steady stream of technical writers to you site.

Now, get out there and tell them.

Ok, that’s how I do it. What did I miss?

About the Author: Ivan Walsh shares Technical Writing and Documentation Plan tips on Klariti. Ivan also teaches Startups how to write a Business Plan on his Business Blog