Jeff MorhousArtificial intelligence tools are quickly transforming content creation, making technical articles that truly stand out is more crucial than ever. To rise above the AI-generated noise, content creators must produce the absolute best article on a given topic, providing insights that machines can't offer.
This means digging into niche areas where AI training may be limited or even focusing on new technical developments beyond the scope of current AI models. By leaning on human expertise, real-world experience, and up-to-date knowledge, people can create content that not only educates our developers better than Large Language Models can.
In this article, we'll explore strategies to ensure your technical content remains valuable, relevant, and distinct in the age of AI.
Table of Contents
Focusing on Developer Education
One of the best strategies to produce technical content that stands out is to focus on developer education. Content marketing can be boiled down to a few goals, and educational content satisfies two of the most important:
- Build authority and trust with potential customers
- Bring in readers from organic search
Writing genuinely helpful educational content for developers often means answering questions like "How do I do x in y framework?" or "What are the differences between framework 1 and framework 2?"
Developers are quick to adopt tools that make their work more efficient, and the adoption of generative AI is quickly replacing search tools like Google as software engineers' tool of choice for answering technical questions. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of data, meaning they're great at answering general questions and not so great at giving specific answers. Contrary to how it seems, tools like ChatGPT aren't actually thinking, leaving a content gap for answering deep questions about niche technical problems.
Before the days of generative AI, articles like "How to write a for loop in Java" might bring in a great deal of traffic if you could rank highly for them, but sites that focus on shallow problems like these are quickly losing traffic from search. When you write educational content as content marketing, you should focus on deeply challenging problems that AI doesn't provide a good answer to. Perhaps integrate this sort of check into your content planning process so that you can consistently publish valuable content that helps software engineers answer questions that AI can't.
Producing Interactive Content
The best educational content is interactive.
Whether it's tutorials or step-by-step guides, content that gives the reader a chance to reinforce what they learned is more likely to benefit them, which is the whole point of educational content!
Interactive content can take many forms, like:
- Narrative/story-driven explanations
- Hands-on tutorials
- Quizzes at the end of sections to check reader understanding
- In-depth guides that can be followed
Developer read technical content to either solve immediate problems or expand their knowledge, and just reading something is not often a good way to learn. Not only will interactive content make readers more likely to walk away having learned something, but it will keep them on your site longer, which is a great signal to search engines that your article is helpful to searchers.
Writing about New Developments
AI tools can only truthfully answer queries about things in or related to their training data. While sometimes these tools hallucinate answers that lead readers astray, other times they'll simply tell a reader that their "knowledge cutoff" makes them unable to answer a given query.
This presents an obvious, albeit temporary opportunity to produce technical content focused on new software releases. Focusing on articles that answer questions about things that AI tools haven't been trained on removes AI tools from the competition almost entirely, making it easier to stand out. People will end up searching the web for answers to these questions, meaning search volume for that topic will be unaffected by AI until the tools are retrained with newer data.
Practically, this can look like several things, including:
- Writing upgrade guides on moving from one version of React to another
- Writing a case study on how a Ruby upgrade affected application performance
- Writing a tutorial on using a new feature of a popular library
Using Images and Graphs
One of the many keys to great creating technical content is to use images to keep readers engaged. While most AI tools can generate images, they tend not to do so when answering technical queries.
Many people are visual learners, and you can make your article more valuable to them than a conversation with an AI tool if you use plenty of high-quality images to explain technical concepts and show off working projects during a tutorial.
Developers will love checking that their work aligns with the tutorial in a way that they can't with an AI conversation, and search tools will reward pages that use high-quality images.
Leveraging AI Tools
Yes, it's ironic, but you should use AI tools to make your content better.
You should not use AI tools to make your content for you, but you should lean on the tools like you might lean on a friend or colleague to check your work.
During content planning, ask a tool like ChatGPT to outline important parts of an article on your topic, then compare that to your existing outline to see if there is anything that the tool thought to include that you may have omitted. You'll still have to make the decision yourself, but it can be a helpful gut check to make sure you're not missing something obvious.
After you're done writing, you can even ask an LLM to write the article for you, then read through it, and make sure that your article is obviously better. Articles that aren't clearly better than their AI-generated counterparts aren't ready to be published, so use the tools to raise the bar for your team.
Another step that's helpful as part of a more comprehensive editing process is to use an AI tool like Claude to give you feedback on your article. A good AI prompt for this might be something like this:
You are the world's best technical and copy editor. I'm going to give you an article on {insert topic here}. You will give me feedback. This article needs to be the best article on the internet, so point out any content that might be confusing to a reader. Point out redundant things that can be deleted. Make suggestions for things I may have missed. Give me any other feedback that you need in order for this to be helpful for a reader: {Paste article}
You're competing for reader attention with AI tools, so you may as well use them to make that competition unfair.
Using a Technical Content Marketing Agency
By implementing these strategies, you can create technical content that not only stands out from AI-generated material but also truly serves and engages your developer audience.
If you're looking to raise the bar for your technical content, SyntaxPen offers real, experienced human insights that go beyond what AI can offer. Our writers bring practical knowledge and understanding to every piece, ensuring that the content is not just informative, but also grounded in real-world application and best practices.
