Setting Up Your Technical Content Marketing Engine

Content Management System Setup

Key Metric:

Content pieces published per month.

Why it Matters:

You need to reliably publish content in order to attract new people to your site.

Final Result:

Team members can easily create, preview, and publish content on your site.

Choosing between static site generators and traditional CMS

Set up your blog using a static site generator and a headless CMS

Using a static site generator and headless CMS for your blog will eliminate most of your speed and security problems. They make it easy to publish new content, add code snippets (like retargeting and analytics), update your stylesheets, and customize everything about your site. For technical content marketing in the AI era, these systems offer additional advantages: they allow more granular control over content structure, metadata, and schema markup – all critical factors in how AI systems process your content. Implementing proper heading hierarchies, structured data for code samples, and clear technical documentation patterns improves how AI systems parse and cite your expertise.

Of course, you can choose to use different solutions (WordPress, for example) to set up your Content Engine. These solutions work fine, but we typically recommend Next.js and Netlify. This setup can be hosted for free using Netlify or GitHub Pages, and the ongoing maintenance is much lower than server-side solutions like WordPress.

These solutions also come with a lot of "ready-to-use" features that make performance optimization and tracking capabilities very easy to set up. Having these in place will ensure that your site adheres to Google's Web Vitals and will lead to better search engine rankings in the long run. Additionally, this architecture makes it easier to implement AI-readable content structures, including explicit answer sections, FAQ schema, and table-based information that AI systems can effectively extract and cite.

Blog architecture (subdomain vs. subdirectory)

What if I already have a blog set up on my domain?

Don't reinvent the wheel. If your CMS works for you and it performs well, there's no need to spend a month migrating to a static site. Website migrations can be very delicate, so consult with your engineering team or an external specialist before you start this process.

If, on the other hand, your CMS is restricting the amount of content you can produce or its poor performance is hurting your ability to rank well in search engines, you should move off it as soon as possible. In the AI era, technical content needs particular attention to structure and machine readability. If your current CMS limits your ability to implement structured data, create properly nested heading hierarchies, or control the semantics of your HTML, consider prioritizing migration. These technical elements significantly impact how AI systems process and cite your content, potentially affecting 60% of your potential audience who now consume content through AI interfaces.

One decision you will face then is whether you'd like your blog to be located on a subdirectory (/blog) or on a subdomain (blog.yourdomain.com). There are different viable approaches, depending on the role your blog plays for your business. But, if you'd like to implement the systems taught throughout our Draft.dev resources, our clear recommendation is to have your blog located in a subdirectory on your top-level-domain. The reason being that, over time, your published blog content will receive backlinks from external sources and we'd rather have them benefit our top-level-domain than a subdomain.

Search Engines "see" subdomains as separate entities. So, if we'd receive a lot of backlinks to our subdomain, we'd then have to generate a lot of backlinks to our top-level-domain from our blog subdomain. Which means we'd have to link to our "main website" as often as possible from our own blog. Which, depending on the type of content we have published, can make sense in a lot of cases, but won't make sense 100% of the time and might be perceived as very pushy.

This subdirectory approach becomes even more important in the AI era where domain authority and topical authority influence how AI systems evaluate the credibility of your content. By keeping technical content on your main domain, you consolidate authority signals that help both traditional SEO and AI citation metrics.

Publishing on third-party platforms

What about publishing on Medium, Dev.to or LinkedIn?

Publishing your blog posts exclusively to a third-party platform like Medium, Dev.to, or LinkedIn is tempting because it's easy, and they offer a built-in distribution network. In the age of AI Overviews and zero-click content consumption it's also a good approach to establish a multi-platform presence as to not having to solely rely on your website for brand awareness.

That said, especially at the beginning of your content marketing journey it is not a good idea as they won't help your primary top-level-domain's ranking in search engines. Links on these platforms are usually "no-follow links," so they won't pass much value to other resources or landing pages you reference from them. Once you have your content engine running, you can use publishing on these platforms as opportunities to syndicate optimized versions with canonical links back to your site.

If you already have content on these platforms, we recommend migrating it to your new blog and updating existing platform content with canonical links pointing to your domain version and to restructure it to serve as a "preview" that drives users to the complete resource on your site.

Setting up Analytics and Tracking Implementation

Key Metric:

Unique visitors per month, average time on page, citations in AI overviews.

Why it Matters:

Analytics give you insights into your audience and tell you how many unique readers your blog posts get, how long those readers are on your site, and where they are based.

Final Result:

Your team can track traffic and user engagement driven by your content marketing efforts. This will help you make meaningful decisions about future content production.

Google Analytics

By far, the most common option for site analytics is Google Analytics. It's not necessarily the easiest to use, but it's powerful, free, and widely documented. If you're using Next.js, here is a follow-along tutorial to set it up. If not, here is the detailed Google Analytics documentation.

Alternatively, you can set up your Google Analytics script using the Google TAG Manager (GTM). GTM allows for automatic asynchronous loading of scripts, which is helpful for optimizing page load speed metrics, but it's more complicated to set up. You can see a list of TAG manager features here to decide if it's worth the investment when you're getting started.

While Google Analytics remains essential, it's now insufficient for measuring technical content performance in the AI era. Consider complementing it with tools that track AI Overview appearances (for example ahrefs), brand mentions in search features, and crawler traffic from AI systems. If you want to get very granular, you can also add custom Google Tag Manager events to track when users engage with more advanced technical elements like code examples, API documentation, or interactive tools, behaviors that signal higher intent in technical audiences.

We also recommend setting up Google Search Console to get insights into organic search impression trends.

Tracking unique visitors in the AI era

Over time, you obviously want the number of unique visitors to your site to rise. When you publish and promote a new piece of content, you'll likely see a spike in traffic from social media and newsletters, but "organic" search engine traffic from specific keyword searches will drive much more traffic in the long term. In Google Analytics, you will want to keep track of the "Active Users" metric to get an overview of how many unique visitors were visiting your site.

In the AI era, you can focus on segmenting your traffic analysis to distinguish between different types of visitors. Particularly for technical content, track developer-specific metrics like code sample usage, documentation page depth, API interaction, GitHub referrals, and repeat visitor patterns. These signals help identify high-intent technical visitors despite lower overall traffic volumes.

If you're looking for how to set up specifically tracking traffic from AI sources in Google Analytics you can check out this tutorial by ahrefs.

It's hard to set realistic goals for the "unique visitors" metric when you're just starting out because it depends on so many factors (domain rating, existing audience, brand strength, promotional process, industry size, and content saturation). But, as you start your content engine and consistently publish new, search-engine-optimized content, you should start seeing organic traffic gains within the first six to nine months. AI citation influence can begin much sooner (2-3 months) with properly structured content. Technical marketers should set expectations accordingly, anticipating slower direct traffic growth (due to AI Overviews intercepting informational queries) offset by increasing citation appearances.

Look for week-over-week growth in both metrics – traditional traffic and AI citation appearances – to measure comprehensive content performance.

In a separate asset published on Draft.dev called "How to Set Up a Content Marketing Engine in the Age of AI", we'll discuss exactly what kind of content you should be creating and offer some tips for optimizing it, but for now, it's important to get comfortable with Google Analytics so you can analyze your results over time.

AI-specific metrics to monitor

In the AI era, we must expand these results to include AI Overview appearances, brand citation rates, and technical authority metrics that measure how frequently your content is referenced by AI systems. What's changed is not the fundamental value of content marketing, but how we must adapt our approach for an environment where AI systems like Google's AI Overviews now mediate information discovery and consumption.

Setting up Lead Collection Systems

Key Metric:

New leads in your database per month.

Why it Matters:

Turn anonymous traffic into "known names" in your database.

Final Result:

Users can opt-in to your database by entering their information in a form, and you can start building a relationship by contacting them regularly via email.

CRM selection (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Kit)

Attracting visitors to your content is obviously the first step, but these visitors will be anonymous unless you find a way to capture their contact information. Businesses rarely make money from anonymous traffic, so you need leads ("known names") that you can create revenue from.

In the age of AI search, this becomes even more critical. When up to 60% of searches never reach your website, you must make the most of the traffic that does arrive. For technical audiences, this means creating higher-value conversion opportunities that are worth the extra click beyond what AI systems have already provided.

One of the core responsibilities of content marketing is to turn "anonymous traffic" into "known names" in your database. Pageviews are nice, but you'll want to care about unique humans that you can start building a relationship with. That means we need their email address and name.

Both Mailchimp and Kit are good solutions for most small marketing teams just getting started. They are easy to set up, highly trusted, and cheap to get going with. Most importantly, they have all the features you'll need to start building your Content Engine.

When marketing to technical audiences, consider additional capabilities that better serve developer-specific needs. Look for CRMs that support tagging by programming languages, technical specialties, or specific tech stack components. Technical audiences respond better to precisely targeted, relevant communications than to generic marketing messages.

Of course, these are not the only viable solutions. We recommend Mailchimp or Kit when you are just getting started, but suggest HubSpot once you have more contacts to manage and the budget and team to support it. You can use a different service, but, for the upcoming examples, we'll walk through Mailchimp.

Creating newsletter signup forms and welcome emails

As a first step, we encourage you to create a signup form and a welcome email. If you have some HTML and CSS skills, you can customize the email signup form. If not, just use Mailchimp's form builder to create a signup form at the bottom of each blog post you publish. Use a double opt-in process to ensure high-quality leads.

For technical content marketing, implement contextual signup forms based on content topic. Developers reading Python content should see Python-specific offers, while those viewing cloud architecture content should receive cloud-focused incentives. These contextual offers can achieve 30-40% higher conversion rates than generic newsletter signups among technical audiences.

Finally, you could consider adding a pop-up signup form. But be aware that this is very aggressive and intrusive. If you have a technical audience it is very likely this will hurt your brand. Your content's primary goal should be building trust. Pop-ups might hurt your reputation more than they help in the long run.

This caution is especially important for technical audiences, who have even lower tolerance for interruptive marketing tactics. Instead, implement "value-trigger" conversion points – offering extended code examples, downloadable configurations, or interactive tools at natural breakpoints in technical content. These contextual offers convert 3-5x better than pop-ups with technical audiences while preserving trust.

Trading high value assets for contact details

Once your content engine is up and running, you should create a gated content asset to attract more signups to your email list. Such an asset is typically a downloadable piece of content with more depth than a typical blog post placed behind a signup form.

In the AI era, your gated content must deliver substantially more value than what AI systems already provide for free. For technical audiences, focus on creating assets with high implementation value: detailed architectural patterns, production-ready code libraries, benchmarking tools, security checklists, or interactive learning environments that solve specific developer problems.

If you don't have such a piece yet, you can start by inviting readers to "join our weekly newsletter," "get updates about new posts," or "sign up for a free trial." Put this call to action (CTA) at the bottom of each blog post.

For technical audiences specifically, create CTAs that speak to developer value propositions: "Get the complete code repository," "Access advanced implementation guides," or "Join our developer community." Avoid marketing language that sounds too promotional, as it tends to alienate technical professionals.

If you are interested in learning more about creating high-quality digital assets that provide value to your readers, check out our other resources about creating blog posts and gated assets based on keyword research and content clusters

Setting up Retargeting Infrastructure

Key Metric:

Retargeting audience size.

Why it Matters:

Retargeting helps increase brand awareness by serving ad impressions to previous blog visitors, and it increases repeat visits to your site.

Final Result:

Advertising impressions to visitors that have previously engaged with your content.

How does retargeting for ads work?

After you install a retargeting code snippet, new visitors are marked with a cookie whenever they read one of your blog posts. This cookie stays in the user's browser for a certain amount of time, during which you can use retargeting to put advertisements in front of those visitors. Retargeting advertisements can appear on social media sites and any websites that are part of the Google Advertising Network.

Depending on your target audience, install the Meta, Google, Twitter/X, or LinkedIn retargeting scripts on your blog. This code usually goes in the same place as your Google Analytics code does, but there's very good documentation for implementing these snippets on each platform's documentation page. If you opt to use Google Tag Manager, you can load your snippets from Tag Manager directly.

Privacy considerations (GDPR, CCPA)

According to GDPR regulations in Europe and the CCPA act in California, users must give consent to these retargeting cookies. We recommend cookie consent solutions like Cookie Script or Iubenda for this. You can find a list of "Content Mode Partners" on Google's CMP Partner Program page.

If you are not sure about the rules in your locale, be sure to check with a lawyer or experienced professional first.

Building audiences without budget

Even if you don't run ads right away, it's very powerful to have these tracking scripts in place ahead of time. That way, whenever you do decide to start advertising, you can turn it on and immediately start sending ad impressions to your cookied visitors, driving traffic to your landing page of choice.