Advent of Technical Writing: Publishing Contributor Blog Posts

This is the twenty-third post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

An internal contributor has written a blog post. You, the content editor and publisher, have a final draft in your hands. What's next? That's a great question.

In this post, I am going to talk about a few tips for managing internal contributors' work. I will focus on internal contributors, since managing content written by third parties is a separate process. I plan to document said process in another blog post.

Throughout the content production process, I explicitly communicate to internal contributors that I will manage the publishing process. I do this when we first start talking about the idea for content and after we have worked together to arrive at a final draft. This is important to me because I want to make sure contributors know that they do not need to learn a new tool to publish content. Contributing writing is terrific; there is no need to educate team members -- even repeat contributors -- on the publishing process.

Publishing an article: (Maybe) More than you think

When I have a final draft, I need to follow these steps before I prepare a piece of content:

1. Taking the content from a Google Document (our collaborative editing tool of choice for blog posts) and copying it into our CMS;
2. Making sure every heading has the right level (i.e. a title, subtitle, h1, h2);
3. Removing unnecessary line breaks introduced when copying the document into our CMS;
4. Providing instructions on how to create an authorship profile in our CMS, and;
5. Adding meta information (i.e. a meta description, the post URL).

It is a lot of steps, right? I don't want team members to have to worry about the steps above. I regularly have to make small changes to make sure content looks they way it should on our website (i.e. changing heading levels). I'm thrilled when people write content and I want to encourage people to contribute more. Providing the above instructions would be counterproductive to that goal.

Notably, there are idiosyncracies with our CMS that make it unintuitive for first time users. The details can be subtle, such as the requirement that we add a line break after all callout boxes to make sure content is spaced out. Contributors don't need to worry about this. It is my responsibility as a technical writer and editor to ensure the work goes live.

Hence, I publish content in our CMS for content I have edited, or communicate with another member of our publishing team (i.e. our marketing lead, who has been through the above process many times) to help ensure a post is published.

Authorship

When contributors write blog posts, we offer to publish it under their name on our blog. This involves creating an author profile in our CMS. An author proile features the name of the contributor, a profile photo (optional, but preferred), and a bio.

During the publishing process for a contributor's first post, I tell the contributor to look out for an email invitation to our publishing tool. This ensures the contributor is expecting the invitation and knows to action on it. Then, I ask them to fill out their profile with the aforementioned pieces of information. I provide guidance on what a bio should look like, with reference to examples.

Here are some examples, with a new example on each line:

James is a Technical Marketer at Roboflow, working toward democratizing access to computer vision.

Marketing at Roboflow! My favorite thing to do is make ideas come true.

ML Growth Engineer @ Roboflow | Owner @ github.com/SkalskiP/make-sense (2.4k stars) | Blogger @ skalskip.medium.com/ (4.5k followers)

By providing examples, a new contributor can guage what kind of information they can and may want to include in a bio.

Our CMS requires an author profile to be set up before we can publish a blog post, so I proactively communicate with contributors to make sure they set up their profile quickly.

Publishing the post

A post is in your CMS, now you can publish it. Exciting! But, don't hit publish and be done. You need to communicate to the author that their post is live. I recommend doing this as soon as you publish a post. Tell your team member that their blog post or documentation is live. Send a URL so they can see it. A published blog post or piece of documentation with their name on it can be a personally significant moment for someone.

When you have informed the author that their post is live, offer to share the post with the rest of the team. If the author wants to share their post internally first, make sure they have the opportunity to do so. When a post has been shared, make sure that all relevant parties (i.e. a sales team) sees the post.

In cases where a piece of content is particularly important to a team -- for example, if a blog post highlights a use case that a sales team has seen come up in many recent leads --you may want to hand-write a message that summarizes a post and why it may be useful for another team to read. This can go a long way to ensuring that your team knows new content is available.

You should also work with the contributor on a promotion plan if content in question is a blog post that is viable to promote.

Does the contributor want to share it on LinkedIn? If so, offer to re-share from your company account. Can you set up a scheduled post in your company's social media profile to announce the content?

When new internal contributors produce content, I explicitly state in an open Slack message in our #content channel that it was someone's first blog post for our company. I do this because I want to make sure new contributors not only get recognition for having written a post, but also that this was their first time writing.

Lastly, make sure the contributor is aware that they can contribute more content. If there is interest but the team member doesn't know what to write, offer to share ideas that they can think about. Be clear that you are always available if and when they want to contribute again.