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Our Guide to Using a Technical Writing Service

January 7, 2021 by Christin

If you’re reading this, you might be thinking about producing a technical article for your blog or website. 

You generally have a few choices: you can do the work in-house, hire an agency or a freelancer, or use a technical writing service to do the work for you. Some companies choose to hire full-time technical writers, while others might prefer to source their work out to a self-managed service like ours.

All of these options can generate results. But how would you go about deciding which solution fits you best? 

In this article, we’ll go over what a technical writing service does and highlight when using one can bring your company exceptional value.

Context: what’s a technical writing service?

A technical writing service is a process-oriented team that produces technical articles based on a customer’s specifications. You as the customer will typically provide a topic and a set of guidelines. The service will then produce publication-ready articles based on those parameters.

At our technical writing service Wizard on Demand, we ask our customers to fill out the same standard form when requesting an article, which allows us to process multiple assignments at a time. We also follow a uniform process when creating each article, giving our customers the same high service levels—regardless of the job.

What makes a technical writing service special?

As a technical writing service, we find that we’re able to add greater value to the customer as we gain expertise in a particular field of content production. Adding rules on what we do allows us to assure consistent quality, create predictable results for our customers, and improve our offering each time we work through our process.

When should you use a technical writing service?

There are three main scenarios when you should work with a technical writing service to achieve the best possible results for your business.

When you require technical expertise

Many SEO managers are not necessarily subject matter experts (SMEs), and that’s OK. After all, it’s not part of their job description to be competent in the topics they might need to cover for their more technical audiences like software engineers, SREs, or machine learning developers.

However, an SEO manager’s inexperience in technical domains may create issues when hiring writers, editors, and SMEs, or when assessing the quality of technical articles. At that point, the SEO manager may become a human bottleneck to your business’s content ambitions. The usual HR processes available at companies might not be enough to address the technical expertise issue.

A technical writing service will always collaborate with SEO managers to fill any gaps in technical expertise and help unlock the SEO team’s potential to meet their content goals.

When you need a self-managed team that can progress quickly

If you’re like most SEO professionals, your calendar is already quite full with 1:1 meetings, team calls, and planning exercises. You also need to dedicate time to focused work.

Now, how would you feel about adding 5 team members over the next few weeks? What about 20 or 30? Bringing new additions on board is hard work, and not everyone in an SEO manager position has the time to do it right.

To address this challenge, a service should always work on growing long-term technical writing teams. This allows you to always have technical writers on-hand and ready to work through your article backlog.

When you need to meet tight deadlines

You have likely been in a situation when a product launch was scheduled but you only got looped in at the last minute. While you wanted to make an impact with high-quality technical content, you simply didn’t have the time to assemble the right team—your team members were bogged down by other work!

Now imagine having access to a team that will take care of the technical writing component for you. This is the experience that any technical writing service should provide, and it should always have writers and content producers available in case your timelines are tight.

What’s it like to work with a technical writing service?

Let’s now preview the mechanics of a technical writing service. Each service usually follows a standard process to produce technical articles. Here’s ours: 

  1. Our customer informs us of the project specifications via a video call, email, or spreadsheet.
  2. We create an outline, which is subject to the customer’s approval.
  3. We start work on the article, keeping the customer up to speed through email updates, as appropriate.
  4. We share the publication-ready article with the customer and address any final feedback.

As you can see, our process requires just enough input from the customer so as not to overwhelm the busy SEO manager, while ensuring that each article meets its requirements. 

Let’s talk

In this article, we covered what a technical writing service does and how it’s different from a freelancer, before going over key business challenges a technical writing service can help you resolve.

If you still have questions, or feel like your business could use a technical writing service, get in touch with us.

Filed Under: Agency vs. freelancer, Agency vs. in-house team, Uncategorized Tagged With: technical writing service

10 Machine Learning Content Sites You Should Know About

March 22, 2020 by Alexey Klochay

For any machine learning company, the technical content you create can make or break your acquisition funnels. For highly specialized products like deep learning frameworks or data science tooling, explaining to your users what correctly your service is doing and how it helps them get started with your product quickly. Users that get started rapidly then go on to become more successful with your product in the long term. At the same time, teaching the basics of machine learning and data science to your audience can help establish your company as a thought leader in the industry.

If you are working on a machine learning blog or documentation site and are looking for inspiration, this article is for you. We’ve collected the resources on machine learning that stand out due to unique content and unique approaches to explaining highly technical topics.

Continue Reading →

Filed Under: Technical content inspiration

5 Ways to Improve the Quality of a Technical Blog Post

February 20, 2020 by Alexey Klochay

Are you looking to publish technical blog posts? If you are, it’s probably one or more of the following goals you’re after:

  • increase the SEO footprint;
  • build trust with the developer audience;
  • decrease churn in your product or service by better informing your prospective customers;
  • reduce the support load by showing your customers how to use your offering effectively.

In all of these cases, the blog posts you produce must be of high quality; otherwise you won’t see the positive results you expect. The components of high blog post quality range from a pleasant reading experience to accurate technical details.

In this article, we walk through 5 ways to improve the quality of your technical blog posts. Use these to update and tweak your existing writing, and have them in mind when creating technical content in the future.

Continue Reading →

Filed Under: Technical writing process

How to Prioritise Technical Content: A Guide

February 8, 2020 by Alexey Klochay

You have a successful SaaS product and your customers are happy with your service but you know that you could be doing more when it comes to content creation. A well-thought-out strategy that outlines the benefits of your product is a sure-fire way to increase brand awareness and loyalty. But, if content isn’t your area of expertise, it can be difficult to know where to start. 

If you’ve been paying attention to your audience then it’s likely that you already have numerous topics that you feel would be beneficial for them, common questions or topics that you feel will provide value, for instance. But, choosing the order for your posts is where people tend to falter. This is why we’ve created a straightforward guide that will help you to prioritise your technical blog posts and kick start your digital strategy.

Continue Reading →

Filed Under: Content prioritisation

Three Tips for Choosing a Technical Writing Service

January 8, 2020 by Alexey Klochay

Congratulations on deciding to work with a technical content agency! Regular, well-written content will help to improve your position in search engine rankings, establish you as a major player in your industry and help you form brand loyalty across your customer base.

But how do you know which agency is right for you? A simple Google search will bring up a list of content writing companies but choosing the best one from this list isn’t easy. We’ve done a little digging and come up with our top three tips for choosing a content writing agency.

We’ve observed what our most successful customers did and have distilled what we saw into the list of 3 tips for choosing a technical writing service.

Continue Reading →

Filed Under: Choosing a technical writing service

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