Choosing Topics for a Blog Post
Presented 2025-04-18
You don’t have to be an expert
You don’t have to be an expert
- Just make the reader one degree better
Advantages of being a non-expert
- Experts struggle to make their writing accessible
- Beginners relate better to beginners
Don’t overstep your expertise
- Write what you know
- Write what you learned
- Admit what confuses you
- Example: Some notes on using nix
- Admit what you do poorly
Don’t let existing articles discourage you
- Two authors can write about the same topic
Attracting people to your product
Attracting people to your product
(“Content marketing”)
Content Marketing
The Bad Way
Content Marketing
The Good Way
- Valuable to reader
- Even if they never use your product
- Your product is a supporting character
- Not the lead role
Examples of Good Content Marketing
- Building a Distributed Turn-Based Game System in Elixir (Fly.io)
- How NAT traversal works (Tailscale)
How I choose topics
How I choose topics
- What showcases a product I made?
How I choose topics
- Did I earn or lose a lot of money on something?
How I choose topics
- What’s an interesting thing I learned from a recent project?
How I choose topics
- What recent experience makes an interesting story?
How I choose topics
- What’s an idea I’m passionate about?
How I choose topics
- What’s a technology I want to learn more about?
How I choose topics
- Here’s a summary of non-text content
- Simon Willison doing the same thing with the MrBeast leak
How I shouldn’t choose topics
- I spent so much time learning this that I have to share it
- Audience be damned!
- Hiring Content Writers: A Guide for Small Businesses
What topics I avoid
- Starting an argument
What topics I avoid
- Attacking a person or small business
- Attacking Stripe is fine
- Criticizing cryptocurrency startups: a lot of extra work + negativity
Enjoyment over consistency
- Most popular tech bloggers focus on a specific topic
- Examples
- John Gruber maily writes about Apple
- Simon Willison mainly writes about bleeding edge AI tools
- I deliberately forfeit readers in exchange for joy
- Examples
Other topic ideas
- Firsthand accounts of working on a startup or side business
Other topic ideas
- Best practices for [popular technology]
Other topic ideas
Other topic ideas
- A beginner’s introduction to [niche topic]
Other topic ideas
- Translating ideas for different domains
How I rank ideas
How I rank ideas
- How excited am I to write this?
How I rank ideas
- Does this align with my goals?
How I rank ideas
- Do I have something unique to contribute?
- My unique thing can just be presenting ideas my way
- My unique thing can be consolidating information
How I rank ideas
- How many people are interested in this topic?
- And can I reach them?
How I rank ideas
- How long will this remain relevant?
- Does freshness matter?
How I rank ideas
- How difficult is this to write?
- Does it require original research?
How I rank ideas
- Excitement
- Alignment
- Unique contribution
- Readership size
- Path to readers
- Shelf life
- Difficulty
Ranking an idea
“Software essays that influenced my thinking”
| Dimension | Score |
|---|---|
| Excitement | Medium |
| Alignment | High |
| Unique contribution | Medium |
| Readership size | Medium |
| Path to readers | Medium |
| Shelf life | High |
| Difficulty | Low |
Ranking an idea
“Unboxing my Framework Laptop 13”
| Dimension | Score |
|---|---|
| Excitement | Low |
| Alignment | Low |
| Unique contribution | Medium |
| Readership size | Medium |
| Path to readers | High |
| Shelf life | Low |
| Difficulty | Medium |