Happy New Year! Many of us in the IT community have made the resolution to either start a new blog or to start blogging more often. We all see the benefit. Who hasn’t done a google search and landed on someone else’s work saving us time or even more?
This week to kick off 2018 the Virtually Speaking Podcast collected expert tips from various bloggers within the community and invited the #1 vBlogger of 2017, William Lam to walk us through them. Whether you’re just getting started or looking for ways to be more effective, this is the episode for you.
Links Mentioned
- Williams Blog – VirtuallyGhetto
- 16 top tips from experts for beginners
- vLaunchPad – Eric Siebert’s aggregated list of all vblogs
- Cross vCenter Server Operations (clone/migrate)
- John’s blog – So you’re thinking about taking an offer
- blogs.vmware.com
Expert tips
A huge thank you to all the bloggers who shared blogging tips. Here are a few of the comments we received:
Duncan Epping – http://www.yellow-bricks.com/ Figure out first what it is you would like to talk about! Find a topic that you want to be an expert in, or are an expert in, and then figure out how to share your knowledge. A blog seems to be what most people do, but these days there are more ways to share knowledge, which may also stand out more: Youtube, Podcasts, eBook. Of course, pick whatever you feel most comfortable with and do it because you enjoy doing it. A lot of hard work / effort will go in to it, if you don’t enjoy the process then it is very unlikely you will be able to do it for a longer period of time. Follow Duncan on twitter.
Anthony Spiteri – https://anthonyspiteri.net The best content comes from tinkering in home labs or at work and it’s not always the deep dive most technical posts that get readership. Follow Anthony on twitter.
Scott Lowe – https://blog.scottlowe.org/ I’d say don’t be afraid to write about a topic even if there are lots of existing articles on that same topic. Sometimes as bloggers we think that we can only write about new and novel ideas, but those can be hard to come by. There’s almost always value in sharing your perspective/experience/knowledge about a topic, even when others have already done the same. Perhaps you’ll see if from a new perspective. Or perhaps your experience learning something will help someone else in there learning journey. Follow Scott on twitter.
Cormac Hogan – https://cormachogan.com/ Write about what you like, not what you think other people would like. Chances are that if you find it interesting then so will others. Follow Cormac on twitter.
Eric Siebert – http://vsphere-land.com/ Blog design is super important, don’t use hard to read and dark themes, make sure your posts have dates on them, have clear author information in the about document so people know who is writing and your background, do not use any pop-ups, create meaningful post titles, don’t re-post other bloggers content, go for post quality instead of quantity, include twitter and rss links and use plug-ins to enhance your blog and make it more usable. Follow Eric on twitter.
Edward Haletky – https://www.virtualizationpractice.com/author/texiwill/ Write for yourself. Your blog becomes your memory in some ways. Nothing better than searching for a problem and find you wrote a solution and you reuse your own solution. Follow Edward on twitter.
Melissa Wright http://vmiss.net/ Just do it. The hardest part is getting started. Don’t worry about if your post is “bad” or “good”, blogging is like a muscle you have to build. It is also fun to go back and read your early blog posts to see how far you have come. Follow Melissa on twitter.
AJ Kuftic http://www.virtualpotholes.com/ Don’t worry about pageviews. Write for yourself and maybe someone else will get some use of it. Follow AJ on twitter.
Trevor Pott http://www.trevorpott.com/ The #1 piece of advice I have for anyone writing a blog is this: research, research, research. Every single statement you make, every claim you make, every controversial topic you broach…you need as close to unimpeachable evidence as possible, because the internet is full of piranhas, and they all want to make you hate yourself. Follow Trevor on twitter.
Wouter Kursten https://www.retouw.nl/ For me it’s have fun doing it and do it because you want to do it not because you have to. Also don’t be afraid to fail but be prepared to correct that Fair as well. Follow Wouter on twitter.
Jorge Delacruz https://jorgedelacruz.uk/ I’m writing mostly about what’s new in different technologies, it’s usually sharing the knowledge I get while doing the lab part, also as my job is not “touching” systems every day it does help me to keep me fresh, although when I was more into sysadmin my blog helped me to investigate and test new technologies. Write for yourself, do it right, if it’s a step by step make sure twice or three times the steps are correct and if you want to improve some SEO and such, make beauty banners for both, blog size and social media size to make more impact and have more visits
If you want to keep things more professional, use the wordpress schedule to publish your blogs a normal working hours, morning the timezone you are on is a good stuff. Use hootsuite or similar to schedule as well recurrent social media updates about your automated blog posts.
At platform level, make sure your site hits a double AA in gtmetrix, have a valid SSL, and use Cloudfare when possible, this will improve your SEO score and attract more visits, plus never forget a valid responsive, or mobile template, so many folks check stuff on the mobiles today.
Last but not least, backups, backups and backups. Nothing could be worse than to lose all your blogs from years, and this might happen if the hosting goes nuts, make sure you have jetpack backups or a dropbox plugin, or if you have a VPS in Linux, a Veeam Agent for Linux or so, but please make sure you protect your writings. Follow Jorge on twitter.
The Virtually Speaking Podcast
The Virtually Speaking Podcast is a weekly technical podcast dedicated to discussing VMware topics related to storage and availability. Each week Pete Flecha and John Nicholson bring in various subject matter experts from VMware and within the industry to discuss their respective areas of expertise. If you’re new to the Virtually Speaking Podcast check out all episodes on vSpeakingPodcast.com.
