Writing tutorial: Using blogging and great documentation to grow your open source project

Description

Writing blog posts and strong documentation for your open source projects is crucial for growing both a user and a contributor base. Your writing is the most effective way to communicate why and how people should use your project. But you’re a software engineer, not a content strategist. You may not know how you can effectively target the people you need to with your blog posts and documentation or how to accurately communicate the goals for your project.

Here’s your chance to improve your skills as you walk through the writing process with Alison Spittel. You’ll cover everything from deciding who you’re writing for to what happens after you press publish (or commit to GitHub). Then you’ll take a look at some projects that have great content strategies and discover how to understand who your target audience is—whether that’s new developers or specialized experts. Along the way, Alison will help you come up with blog post topics, explain how to make that content engaging and understandable, and show you how to reach that audience and grow a following.

You’ll leave with the following completed worksheets:

• A worksheet about your target audience and how to reach them
• A list of possible blog post topics
• An outline of the types of documentation needed for your project
• An outline of a blog post