Creating regular content for your blog is essential to maintaining a presence. If you don’t publish regularly, and refresh your content, you will find your SEO, and wider presence quickly becoming irrelevant. I understand that unlike me, many of you have jobs, and responsibilities when it comes to operating your APIs, and carving out the time to craft regular blog posts can be difficult. To help you in your storytelling journey I am always looking for other stories to help alleviate your pain, while helping keep your blog active, and ensure folks will continue stumbling across your API, or API service, while Google, or on social media.
Another interesting example of how to keep your blog fresh came from my partners over at Runscope, who conducted a featured guest blog post series, where they were paying API community leaders to help “create an incredible resource of blog posts about APIs, microservices, DevOps, and QA.” Which has produced a handful of interesting posts:
- Monolith to Microservices: Transforming a web-scale, real-world e-commerce platform using the Strangler Pattern
- You Might Not Need GraphQL
- 3 Easy Steps to Cloud Operational Excellence
- Building a Steam Powered IoT API with Thingsboard
One thing to note is that Runscope paid $500.00 per post to help raise the bar when it comes to the type of author that will step up for such an effort. I’ve seen companies try to do this before, offering gift cards, swag, and even nothing in return, with varying grades of success and failure. I’m not saying a guest author program for your blog will always yield the results you are looking for, but it is a good way to help build relationships with your community, and help augment your existing workload, with some regular storytelling on the blog.
A guest blogger program is a tool I will be adding to my API communications research, expanding on the tools API operators have in their toolbox to keep their communication strategies active. An active blog does more than just educate your community, and boost your SEO. An active blog, that is informative, and relevant shows that there is someone home behind an API, and that they are investing in the platform. While there are exceptions, the clearest sign that an API will soon be deprecated, or does not have the resources to support consumers properly is when the blog hasn’t been updated in the last six months. While I’m reviewing, indexing, and learning about different APIs, when I come across an inactive blog, or Twitter account for an API, I’ll almost always keep moving, feeling like there really isn’t much worthwhile there, as it will soon be gone.
