Like Software, Great Content Is Not Just Written, It Is Developed

If you are a software developer and you aren't blogging, the chances are that you think it's difficult and there is no process behind it. The truth is that content writers use processes when creating their content online. We are going to break down the process. You will be surprised to see how similar the content development and software development processes are.

Software industry professionals know that software is not just written. It has developed. The same applies to content. Like software, great content should be researched, written well, tested, and maintained.

Before going into detail, let's stress that content development mainly applies to evergreen content. Evergreen content is not tied to one-time events. It is continually relevant and stays actual over a long period. Examples of evergreen content include how-to guides, tutorials, listicles, case studies, etc. Great examples of non-evergreen content are news articles.

You should try to write evergreen content if you can. This means that you should write in a way that you can easily update the content next year and that most parts of the content will not be outdated after a year.

Let's immediately start with the interesting part. Many sources list 5-7 steps for content development and software development processes. We can extract five main steps for content development and software development.

Content development phases

1. Set clear goals
2. Develop a design vision
3. Create your content
4. Analyze and iterate
5. Measure and optimize

Software development phases

1. Planning
2. Design and Prototyping
3. Development
4. Testing and Deployment
5. Operations and Maintenance

Let's match the steps together in the following table.

Now we are ready to compare the disciplines phase by phase. Let's start with the "Set The Goals" phase.

Set Clear Goals

Every article needs to be written for a reason. The reason could be to inform the prospect, get subscribers to the newsletter, build a brand, sell a product, etc. Knowing your goals before writing the article will help you with the outline, and you will have a much better-organized content piece.

Based on the article's goal, you can think better about the audience you want to attract to the page. If you write for your website, you already know a lot about your audience, but the thing is that not everyone in your audience is on the same level with the knowledge about the topic you are covering. While creating a page, you might also think about which group of your audience you will be targeting.

Software development planning includes requirements and feedback gathered from shareholders. Based on this, a decision is made about the features that can be included in the software.

You may want to include a lot of features in your software. However, that's not the best strategy. Having features that are just enough to satisfy the audience's initial goals might be more practical. The missing requirements will usually be addressed in the following cycles if they must be included in the software. The same can be done for content, a different article can be created to accompany the rest of the requirements.

Develop a design vision

Carefully planned content whose purpose is to have organic traffic from search engines starts with SEO keyword research followed by detailed competitor research. This will help construct the outline of the article, get ideas from competitors that you might have missed, name the article and subheading names, etc.

Similarly, in software engineering, the design of the end product is created before the actual development is done.

The domain of the problem that software solves is investigated so that the product would be easily understood and used by customers and maintained by the development team. The notion of keywords is also actual here because one of the main focuses of the domain-driven design is identifying and using the keywords that industry professionals use to describe the concepts.

On the lower level, the design encompasses design patterns which are the general software development best practices.

Finally, if your team is not an agency and builds its products, competitive analysis needs to be conducted as well.

Create your content

Once you have an outline from the previous step, it's time to create the content. This is when the content text is written. The content should answer the searchers' and visitors' questions and solve their problems.

When the text is ready, it's time to insert external and internal links, photos, videos, and any other elements that will make the content easy and delightful to read. However, these steps aren't strictly necessary in this phase because they can be done in the next step by the writer or a content development team.

Note that the resulting text is not the final version. Here is the first draft.

For software development, this phase is mainly for coding. This includes writing the actual code. The code is not visible to the customer. The real value here is to provide the best executable application for the customers. Of course, this cannot be ideal from the beginning. That's why we need the next phase.

Analyze and iterate

Once the first draft of the content is ready, we can continue with this phase. Here are the things that need to be done:

• Editing by the author using assistant tools like spell checkers and content optimizers.
• Editing by an editor.
• Finding points that need to be proven and linking to reliable sources which can prove the point.
• Link the article to other articles on the website. It is important because, like in a book, your website pages shouldn't live in isolation. Together they will give the big picture about the topic.
• Finding and producing images that will help illustrate some important aspects of the content.

Once everything is ready, you can now publish the article. Hooray! Of course, publishing is not enough. You need to promote the post afterward.

In software development, the iterations are mostly built around finding issues and fixing them. The functionality of the whole program is tested in this phase. Ideally, this testing isn't done by coders. It's done by a quality assurance (QA) team.

Because of the experience and because of confirmation bias, QA teams can find a lot more issues. Here, the QA team carries the role of the editor in the content development process. When the quality of the software is good enough, it is published or delivered to the customers.

When the result is good to go in this phase, we can move to the "Measure and Optimize" phase.

Measure and optimize

Now it is time to see how people will react to your work. With Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and other measurement tools. You can check which keywords your page is ranking for in search engine results and how many visits it gets. You can also see the distribution of visits from each traffic source and the time spent on the page.

Based on this data, you can optimize the page to improve its ranking and readability to eventually get more visits and higher dwell time. Measurement and optimization are continuous processes. However, we can divide it into two parts.

The first part would be the phase of the quicker cycles. You may want to measure and optimize the article more frequently until you manage to rank it well in the search engine rankings.

The second part is for maintenance. Like almost everything in this world, content requires maintenance. Some parts of the content become obsolete or require updates, the external web pages linked by your website may become unavailable, a competitor might write a better article and overtake you and you would want to bounce back, etc. This can happen a couple of times a year or less often.

In software development, this phase is for getting feedback from the users and resolving the reported issues. There are cases when the development and QA teams miss or cannot ideate. When using the software, users might give more actionable and useful feedback compared to the feedback received during the planning phase. So this phase is super important for software development.

Note that if you provide a Software as a Service (SAAS) solution, you can get invaluable feedback if you automatically measure the user interactions. With an automated measurement system, you can improve user experience, fix issues, and improve flows without waiting for users' feedback.

Conclusion

Content writing needs to be well organized. This will help you to have great content. Here are the phases that content development passes. It is similar to the software development process. Here are the phases of content development.

Content needs to be planned, then the outline of the content needs to be constructed. The next step is the actual content creation phase which is followed by continuous improvements before publishing the content.

Once the content is published, you will have great tools that you haven’t had before. You have genuine "feedback" from users. Based on the metrics like how many people read your content, how long they stay on your page, do they scroll to the specific paragraph in the text, you can improve your content? This is a continuous process.

If you monitor your content piece and update it, you can improve its performance and extend its life as long as you wish.