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Everything is ROI. My company has heavily invested in blogging [1] which has helped us become influential in the product space (enterprise ETL around Apache Ai

Everything is ROI. My company has heavily invested in blogging [1] which has helped us become influential in the product space (enterprise ETL around Apache Airflow). As an engineer, every time I write a post I try to balance time vs ROI. I think it's more valuable to pump out a good post that takes 5-10 hours of effort (not counting writing the code etc) vs tons of very low effort posts when you're first getting started. Occasionally, you can find time for a high investment post like 20+ hours but this is pretty difficult and probably not worth your time at the early stages. If 10 hours invested into writing a good post turns into thousands of page views turns into a small number of conversions, this can be very beneficial in growth. One trick you can do is recycle ideas across blog posts, meetup talks, and conference talks. Another thing to think about is that not every engineer enjoys investing in writing. If it's not something you enjoy, I wouldn't force yourself to do it. Some people are much better at formats like podcasts or videos (personally I'm the opposite though). Happy to answer more specific questions if interested (email in profile). Feel free to reach out. [1]: https://www.astronomer.io/blog https://www.astronomer.io/blog

tixocloud 9y ago
Given that the enterprise ETL space is crowded, how do you pick and choose topics that are relevant while still unique to your company?
- tedmiston 9y ago
  It definitely is crowded. I'd say that the strategy varies by department (in engineering, we have a lot of freedom with technical posts) so we tend to write about using flagship frameworks and platform design decisions. At the end of the day, the goal of my technical content is just to write interesting things that draw other engineers and technical people like data scientists to our blog and site. It also helps establish credibility in a crowded space. (I'd also start to like doing tutorial posts in the near future.) I think if you have the opportunity to speak with leaders in your industry and work collaboratively on blog posts / podcasts / etc that speaks volume as well. We've done some of this already and it draws a lot of highly engaged traffic.
  - tixocloud 9y ago
    Thanks for the tip.

tixocloud 9y ago

Given that the enterprise ETL space is crowded, how do you pick and choose topics that are relevant while still unique to your company?

tedmiston 9y ago
It definitely is crowded. I'd say that the strategy varies by department (in engineering, we have a lot of freedom with technical posts) so we tend to write about using flagship frameworks and platform design decisions. At the end of the day, the goal of my technical content is just to write interesting things that draw other engineers and technical people like data scientists to our blog and site. It also helps establish credibility in a crowded space. (I'd also start to like doing tutorial posts in the near future.) I think if you have the opportunity to speak with leaders in your industry and work collaboratively on blog posts / podcasts / etc that speaks volume as well. We've done some of this already and it draws a lot of highly engaged traffic.
- tixocloud 9y ago
  Thanks for the tip.