@mcsteffington asked for beginner blogging tips for software testers, so thought it would be useful to collate some here. I suggested a couple on the Twitter thread, but I’ll expand a bit more here.
Platform to use:
This question often comes up.
I personally always recommend WordPress (very flexible for simple or more complex needs) or Medium (great for anyone, easiest one to get going, just sign up for an account and post).
Imho - SquareSpace sucks because it doesn’t provide valid RSS (and it therefore cannot feed into our Testing Feeds).
There are other more modern platforms out there that perhaps others could advise on.
Writing
It’s easy to think that what you are writing is stupid, not important, or irrelevant. The act of writing is a great experience within itself. I don’t do enough of it personally and often just dump ideas/thoughts/advice in forum posts here, but I always benefit personally from getting each and every blog post out there - even if it is just for my future self and reading back on my own thoughts.
I love how @maaret just puts blog posts out there. I know she always says that she writes for herself and no one else.
Marketing
If you find value in others finding your work then you should put effort into promoting your blog.
- Join Twitter, follow people and tweet about your blog.
- You can do the same on LinkedIn and Facebook.
- Participate on Quora. Be helpful, don’t get over enthusiastic about linking back to your own stuff, you’ll just get penalised
- There’s a QA and SoftwareTesting Reddit. Get involved there!
- Create an email list or use WordPress widgets to help do that automatically for you. I find people these days don’t really know or use RSS. This makes me sad
- Write for others. Plenty of news and magazine type websites are always looking for writers. Of course this includes MoT, but I’d encourage every tester to write for non-testing places too. We need to show more people that we exists!
- And just write useful, interesting and well structured stuff!
- Check out our Ministry of Testing Writers Guide for super useful tips.
That’s all for now, running out of time, am sure others can add to it.