Starting a Tech Blog? Here are 75+ Tools to Get You Going

The past year had a massive curveball thrown at us in the form of a pandemic. The world cooped up indoors, and quarantine became the new normal.

Amidst the coronavirus outbreak and its after-effects, we had one thing in abundance — time! This created the perfect opportunity to dive straight into working on your dream project, which was on the backburner for a while.

A lot of aspiring bloggers took the opportunity to start their blogs — tech and otherwise.

However, things are back to normal now and most of us have got back to our regular routines. And this does not mean that you need to hit a pause on your dream project.

In fact, if you’re still on the fence about starting your own tech blog, the best time is now (and literally whenever you want to start!).

This article is designed to give you all the motivation, tools, tips, and suggestions you need to start a tech blog.

Let’s dive right in!

Benefits of starting your own tech blog

This should motivate you enough to start thinking about your tech blog. It is always worth it!

The economy is plummeting, and work has almost come to a standstill across the globe. But the internet is here to rescue us. Starting a blog can give you the monetary boost you need during this slump from the comfort of your home.

Your tech blog can be a great way to get your creative juices flowing. If you are focused enough, you’ll find yourself coming up with terrific ideas.

Whether you’re an aspiring author, film critic, or fashion enthusiast, your blog can give your overall online presence a major facelift. Moreover, it can do wonders to enhance your authority on that subject, niche, or industry.

With a consistent blog that follows the right SEO rules and delivers quality content, you’re sure to receive a good footfall of visitors. You can connect with like-minded people within your industry and use that to bolster your business.

How to build a reader persona for your tech blog

Irrespective of your writing talents, if you aren’t aware of who you’re writing for, your blog isn’t going to succeed. Maybe some of your articles would do well but you can’t expect that with all of them. A reader persona is essential for content creation because it will help you in designing your content to perfectly match the mindset of your audience.

If your audience can’t relate to your content, they aren’t going to waste their time reading it. But when you research and establish an official content persona, you stand a much better chance to attract the right audience. Besides, spending hours on your blog would also help you in achieving your pre-established goals.

Benefits Of A Reader Persona

A reader persona can help you determine your blog’s strategy, as well as in making everyday blogging decisions. A few examples are:

• Determining your content strategy: how does my reader make purchases? What topics would be relevant to them?
• Deciding what to write regularly: What part of my company’s journey would my readers be most interested in? What kind of information and knowledge do they want to acquire?
• Knowing where to share the blog: What social media platforms or networks is my reader mostly active on?
• Choosing brands, interviewees, influencers, etc. to write about: Does this brand or individual provide value to my reader?

Besides, the biggest benefit of a reader persona is a higher conversion rate. Once you have the persona, you won’t be missing the mark as you’re no longer guessing about your audience. Now, you should be able to see a rise in the ROI from your blog, because you know who exactly are you writing for, and what exactly do you need to write to provide value to them.

Steps to create a reader persona for your tech blog

Constructing a content persona is a customized process, and below are the steps you need to follow:

#1 Demographics

Demographics are the easiest of all characteristics of a content persona to research because they simply describe a group of people objectively.

Some of the basic data types of it are:

is a great tool to start with which can give you a basic level of this demographic information about your audience. Then you can proceed to Google AdWords Display Planner, which gives a more detailed insight into your audience. By searching for keywords there, you can dive deeper and get even more accurate results.

#2 Values and Fears

Identifying objective characteristics like demographics are easy. But identifying psychographics, which informs about the values, attitudes, preferences, and fears of the readers is tough. No online tools can help you in identifying these characteristics directly since they are subjective. However, you can observe them taking help from the below-mentioned spaces:

Reddit — Most readers are active on , and you should find your potential audience there as well. Just search for your startup’s niche in the search bar, and pick the most relevant from the results. Look for the posts and threads that best match your niche, and spend time reading them. Reading through them will give you a better understanding of what exactly the readers want, what are their pain points, and more. Also, identify threads with minimal responses to understand what the audience is not interested in.

Forums — A forum is a site where people discuss specific topics, industries, or a specific niche. If you aren’t a part of any forum yet, just google ‘(your niche) forum’. Do consider the size and activity of the forums before picking one for your research. Follow the same procedure as Reddit. The goal is simply to empathize with your audience and have a better understanding of them.

#3 Goals and Challenges

Your reader persona also needs to take into consideration the goals and challenges of your audience. For instance, if your potential audience is struggling with education loans in the early phase of their careers, you need to focus your content around budget-friendly products. Reading blog comments, exploring their social media profiles, and the kind of content they share should give you a better idea about it.

You can also float surveys for your readers to fill up about their goals, challenges, and any other details that you’d like to know about them. Getting direct responses from them could give you a great perception of them, and understand their behavior and preferences.

#4 Implementation

Now that you have all the information ready, put them together and create an avatar, probably name it. You can even add a picture to give a face to the name. Doing this can help you familiarize yourself with them. Now whenever you write something for your tech blog, focus on one of your personas in mind, and pretend that you’re writing it for that avatar of yours.

5 tips to create your tech blog

Even though technology has become one of the most popular niches for blogging these days, creating a successful tech blog that can attract and engage with the audience is not easy.

What topics to write about, how to write them, how to set the blog apart from all the other tech blogs out there, and how to drive blog audiences of other industries to your tech blog — all need to be taken care of by the blogger.

Here are a few actionable tips that you can use for your tech blog:

#1 Pick Your Niche

You might feel that tech writing is a niche in itself, so why do you even need to pick a niche? But the thing with tech blogs is that the niche is too vast. If you start writing anything and everything related to technology, you’ll never be able to get the desired results for your tech blog.

If you’re writing about technology in general, you need to stay updated about the whole universe of technology. Keeping track of every little update or release, which usually happens almost daily, is really difficult. The smaller your scope, the more updated you can be, and the better quality you can provide.

You need to make sure of two things before picking a tech niche. Firstly, it shouldn’t be saturated; meaning it shouldn’t have so many pre-existing blogs, that there is hardly any scope for your blog.

Secondly, you should genuinely be interested in writing about that niche as a tech blogger.

Tech blogging, like any other blogging, is a creative field, and to get the best results, you should be able to provide the best quality from your end. And that won’t come if you aren’t interested in it.

#2 Domain Name

• It should be brandable
• It should be easy to pronounce
• It should be easy to remember
• It should be short and simple
• It should be in sync with your niche and theme

#3 Keyword Research

Like every other blog, even tech writing is highly dependent on keywords for traffic. One of the best ways to get traffic for your blog is to rank high in Google search results whenever users are searching for related topics online. And how do you do that? Through — with the right keywords.

Picking the right keywords is a tricky thing. If you feel that popular keywords will get you traffic, you couldn’t be any more wrong. As a tech blogger, your skill should be to identify keywords that are popular but only up to a certain limit, that face lesser competition, and reflect your brand and blog piece the best.

If you use highly popular keywords, your blog would never make it the top results because of the high level of competition. On the contrary, if you use unpopular keywords, your blog wouldn’t get the traffic because people wouldn’t really be looking for something like that online. The trick is to find keywords that are popular but less competitive.

One way to achieve that is to use long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords usually give better results, because they are more specific in nature, reflect exactly what is being talked about, and face lesser competition.

#4 Social Media

Your blog wouldn’t be a blog if there is no audience to read it. SEO is one way to get an audience for your blog, but it’s definitely not enough. A good tech blogger knows how to drive traffic to the blog through all the possible sources — like social media.

Social media platforms like Faceb ook , Twitter , Instagram , LinkedIn , YouTube , aren’t for just social networking or entertainment anymore. Since they have become such an integral part of the lives of people, work and leisure both are influenced by them.

As a tech blog, you need to have your Facebook page, Twitter handle, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts, and so on, and build your following on the respective platforms.

You should not just be keeping your blog in mind but also your social media. If you cross-promote your blogs on your social media, you can drive huge traffic from there to your blog.

#5 Linking

Linking is simply the procedure of adding hyperlinks within your blog to other pages. There are basically two types of linking:

• External Linking — When you add hyperlinks that redirect your audience to another domain other than yours, it’s called external linking. Now it could be to a site like Yahoo, it could be to a page that provides stats you’ve mentioned in your blog, or it could also be to your competitor blogs.
• Internal Linking — When you add hyperlinks within your blog pieces that redirect your audience to another page or blog piece in your website/domain itself, it’s called internal linking.

There are two benefits of linking.

Firstly, it provides a better experience to your audience as with the help of other sources or content pieces, they can absorb your content better.

Secondly, linking helps search engines like Google, better understand and interpret your blog, and as a result, your blog posts rank higher in the SERPs driving more traffic.

The key is to follow a few basic rules that enhance your blog and give you better results than what you would have otherwise got with the exact same content.

Define your niche, pick an appropriate domain name, research your keywords well and make the best use of them, sync your blog with social media to drive more traffic, and add links to your tech blog.

75+ tools and resources to help you start your tech blog

If you’re worried about getting started on creating your blog, we’ve got you covered with this one-stop blog post for beginners. It includes an exhaustive list of 75 resources that provide tools, tips, hacks, and guides that you can browse through and use to get your blog up and running.

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Read the full article here.

Originally published at https://get.tech on March 10, 2021.