Writing and submitting blogs posts for the Community Insights blog on EngX is an excellent way to share knowledge, experiences, and innovations with the engineering community. To help you create compelling and impactful blog posts, here are few handy hints and tips to get you started.

Is my content right for EngX?

A blog post is a conversational-style article of at least 500 words, unlike social media post, which are short and concise. For example, the following post is the right type of format for a social media post on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn but isn’t suitable for a blog post.

Aim to tell an engaging story in 500 words or more, making sure your blog post has a beginning, middle and ending.

Some ideas:

• Share your experience on an interesting engineering project, either for an employer or for your own personal interest.
• Is there a common misconception about your work/project/industry that you’d like to dispel?
• What is the greatest societal or engineering challenge that you think your industry can help tackle and how?
• Are there opportunities for collaboration with your work, project or industry?
• Case studies with benefits and lessons learned.

Capture the attention of your readers with a compelling title and introduction, and make sure you include at least one learning point for community members to discuss or take away.

Know your audience

Think about your audience and the information you’re sharing. Would they find it relevant or interesting? Remember, EngX is a community created to enable knowledge sharing between engineers, technicians, and others interested in technical topics. It is open to the public and attracts a global audience, not just members of the IET.

Using AI language models

You may be tempted to use an AI language model such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Bing to help you write your posts. This is fine as long as you don't rely solely on the text that it writes. AI language models generate content based on patterns, but can sometimes produce inaccurate or nonsensical results. Treat it as a useful tool to assist you but not as a substitute for content written solely by you. Combine the text it writes with your words and in your writing style and remember to proofread and edit the content for clarity, accuracy, coherence, and grammar.

Remember, AI language models can use the data that you share, so be sure to only share content you’re happy to have in the public domain.

Title

Choose a catchy title for your blog post. The title of your blog post should capture the attention of potential readers and entice them to click into your post and read on.

The introduction

The first paragraph of your post will either keep people reading the rest of your post or move on quickly to something else. Make sure it’s compelling enough to encourage visitors to read on. Try not to use links to external content in your intro text as this will immediately take readers away from your post before they start, and don’t forget to use your main keywords in the introduction which will help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

The main event

• Use sub-headings to structure the main content of your post into scannable sections and break up long blocks of text.
• Use other formatting such as bold, italicised, and underlined text to emphasise words or phrases and make them stand out. Be selective though as too much formatting can be too much!
• Bullet points and numbered lists are also useful to separate out steps or specific points within a post and make them stand out.
• Don’t forget to add related images and videos in your post too, drag them to size.
• Expand on any abbreviations you use as not everyone reading your post will know what they mean. Always write out in full when you first use it. You can then use the abbreviated version throughout the rest of the post. For example ‘The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) can then be referred to as just ‘The IET’ within the rest of a post.

Signing off

Make sure you give as much thought to the final paragraph of your post as you do to the introduction. Posts that end abruptly with no apparent conclusion can leave a reader feeling short changed. Remember to finish your post with a suitable call to action or an invitation to engage. Ask readers to leave their thoughts and opinions in the comments or add a short poll for readers to participate in.

Tagging and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Remember to add technical topic tags to your post so people following those topics will see your post in their EngX newsfeed and digest emails. Only choose the tags that are most relevant to the topics covered in your post and make sure you’ve added your keywords for SEO.

Banner image

Choose an interesting and relevant image to use for your post image. Your image will be displayed as a thumbnail image in the list of blog posts in the blog and at the top of your post as a banner image, and if your blog post is featured it will be displayed on the home page of EngX.

A good image can encourage or entice someone to read your post. More information on choosing images can be found here: Choosing your blog post banner image.

Accessibility

Keep in mind that some readers may have visual impairments or rely on assistive technologies to read your posts. To make sure your blog post is accessible to all community visitors, including those using adaptive technologies, please consider the following tips:

1. Alt text for images: Always include alt text for images. When you upload an image, you’ll find a field for ‘image alternate text’. Fill this with a descriptive summary of your image. Remember, there’s no need to start your alternative text with ‘an image of’.
2. Structuring your content: Break up lengthy content with subheadings and bulleted lists to enhance readability. If you use headings in your post, start with heading 2. If you are nesting headings do so by their rank order. For example, make sure that heading 2 is not followed by heading 6.

Submit your post

When you submit your post, our team will review it to make sure the content and topic are appropriate for the EngX community. All posts published in the Community Insights blog must comply with our Community Rules and Guidelines.

If your blog post is accepted, it will be published, and you’ll receive a notification. If it’s not accepted, we’ll let you know why and suggest any necessary changes. If you have questions or need help, please reach out to the admin team at community-online@ietengx.org.

Share your posts

Once published don’t forget to share and link to your blog posts via your own social media accounts to increase its audience and readership!

Engaging with your readers

Continue to engage with your readers by responding to comments and feedback on your post in a timely manner. Acknowledge contributions and build your audience by participating in the comment section on your post.

Need some inspiration?

Here are a few examples of well written, engaging, and interesting blog posts from some of our volunteers and IET staff members:
Artificial Intelligence – good or bad?
Renewables and net zero – are we ready, steady, go…?
What are the implications of the Retained EU Law for engineers?
What engineers and policy makers need to know about the ChatGPT revolution
From Pencil to Pixel: Why sketching still matters in modern design
IoT in Defence
Lift off at UK Students for Exploration and Discovery in Space Conference

Ready to start blogging?

Read our guide on Creating your blog post to help with filling in the blog post template and if you have any questions or need further advice contact the EngX team at community-online@ietengx.org.