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Topics and Formats

Even if you have a content plan and you have a lot of expertise on the topic, sooner or later a crisis of creativity can happen: what to start with, where to find ideas, how to stay interesting and hit all the goals.

Types of publications you can use

  • Company's experience and real customer cases. This is the most popular and valuable type of publications — you share experience in development, management and organization, tell real stories related to clients and projects. These topics are usually lively discussed, users tell about their experience or speak about your project, if there was an experience of interaction with it.

  • Open source projects. If you are running your open source project or your employees are actively using third-party libraries and make commits, you should tell users about this experience, reveal the solutions you apply or the history of development.

  • Tips and tricks for professionals. Check-lists and lists of working solutions for professionals are in demand. By the way, a check-list on the topic can decorate any article. You can also prepare training materials and publish them with a "Tutorial" mark (you will find it on the layout page of the article).

  • Complex theoretical questions. In any field, there are notorious "centerpiece of philosophy" that cause controversy and are discussed at all conferences. Gather the most complete theory, look at it it from a different angle — so that readers get into the problem and get involved in the discussion.

  • Historical publications. You can tell about the stages of the evolution of the product, the history of the development of technologies related to the company, or the history of the related problem.

  • Software or hardware reviews. Classic reviews in which you present your solutions, talk about the functional features, features and methods of application. It is better if the review is correlated with the story of how your solution will help solve the problems and tasks of customers.

  • Interviews with experts. In every company there are people with a unique expertise in their field. You can prepare an interview or a series of interviews with such people — exposing their experience and most importantly — professional advice and secrets.

  • Industry digests. You can create your own unique digest on professional topics (for example, design digest or system integration digest) and with a given periodicity publish news and useful materials, or even better - expert comments.

  • Office reviews. You can prepare a photo or video report, add professional comments and prepare a virtual tour. Such material is especially good for solving HR goals. For example, publishing vacancies on Habr Career you can give a link to such a tour so the candidates will get a clear idea of where they will have to work.

  • Announcements and content from conferences, hackathons, festivals. Transcriptions of reports, video recordings or broadcasts, and comments to solutions that made tasks solved on the hakaton. If you invite to an event or looking for spokesman, do not limit yourself to a short description, but make high-quality preface with topic coverage.

  • Translations. These can be translations of good publications or translations of an articles of your foreign colleagues. If it's a clean translation — publish it as a translation, indicating the type of publication and source. If you add expert comments, then the type of "translation" is not necessary. Do not forget to check if someone has translated the text before you.

  • Your own formats. Polls, discussions, trends, etc. Infographics or high-quality thematic comics can also go well (do not forget to put copyrights and links to the originals). Do not hesitate to experiment with formats — you may become an innovator and a local Habr trendsetter.

Topic sources

In most cases the main source of topics would be marketing research. This can be an analysis of the product, the interests of the audience or competitors'. You can also check the publications in the relevant thematic hubs, find the gaps, materials of interest and generate your own content based on this analysis.

Idea sources
Idea sources

If you have absolutely no ideas, feel exhausted, then you can browse:

  • magazines;

  • conference materials.

This does not mean that you need to copy all the content (moreover, it is not recommended!) – only selective ideas and insights are needed.

Which materials can be useful?

Before you create a publication it is worth doing some preparations. Gather all the materials, highlight the main thing in them, make a plan for future publication. If necessary, ask colleagues and collect information from them:

  • code with comments;

  • testing results;

  • cases of the implementation and running your product on the client side;

  • benchmarks.