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:
- Our customer informs us of the project specifications via a video call, email, or spreadsheet.
- We create an outline, which is subject to the customer’s approval.
- We start work on the article, keeping the customer up to speed through email updates, as appropriate.
- 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.