I’m a big believer that bloggers should run their own personal blogs, under their own personal domain names, to maximize their long-term investments in themselves. You’re building a brand for yourself, and you want to control that asset no matter what.
But What If You Want More Readers?
I’ve talked to bloggers who say they’re frustrated blogging on their own sites because they don’t have enough readers. They feel like they’re toiling alone in the dark, with nobody seeing their work. They’re not dying for readers, but they want to know that their work isn’t going in vain. If they post a valuable solution, a hard-to-write article, or a timely tip, they want to know that it’s going to benefit the most readers possible.
We’ve got a solution that lets you keep your independence and gets you more readers: syndicate your blog at SQLServerPedia. We’ll “echo” your blog posts from your own SQL Server blog automatically.
Syndication Means You Stay In Control
Syndicating your blog at SQLServerPedia doesn’t mean changing the way you write. If you’re like me, you blog about all kinds of things, not just SQL Server. We’ll help you set up a “SQL Server” category on your blog, and our syndication software only picks up blog entries in that category.
You can – and should – still blog about whale bacon, your favorite music, or your adventures in Vegas without feeling like you need to clean up your act for syndication. If you feel like blogging about personal stuff ten times in a row, then do that – we’re not going to pressure you to keep up a minimum number of SQL Server posts per week in order to be syndicated.
How You Benefit From Being at SQLServerPedia
At the bottom of every blog post on SQLServerPedia, we show a list of related blog posts. Take a look at the bottom of this post by Kevin Kline to see an example. If you blog about something related to an existing hot topic here at SQLServerPedia, your blog post will show up as a related post on that existing link – thereby getting you more readers.
We also put time and effort into publicizing our site. We give out SQLServerPedia t-shirts at user group meetings, PASS events, and code camps. We run ads for SQLServerPedia online and in print magazines. We threw quite a nice relaunch party at the PASS Summit, some of which I even remember.
And it doesn’t require any work on your end – no logins to manage, no new blog editor to learn, no copy/pasting between blog systems. We just automatically suck your blog entries out of your RSS feed.
Bring SQLServerPedia Readers To Your Site
You know me: I’m a very big cheerleader on building your own brand. I wouldn’t set this up if it wasn’t about building your own brand too.
In your syndicated blog entries, you should link to other personal blog entries you’ve made that your readers may find interesting. They click the link, they go to your site to read the article, and they see you as a person instead of a faceless SQL-only blogger.
You should also link to your Twitter feed so readers can communicate more with you, get to know you better, and ask questions about your blog entries.
What If You Don’t Have A Blog Yet?
If the whole concept of starting your own blog sounds like too much work, we’ve got an answer for that too: you can blog at SQLServerPedia without your own blog. We’ll give you an author account, show you how to use it, and let you write to your heart’s content. Our only restriction is that your entries need to focus on SQL Server.
If you want help getting started, one of our editors (probably me) can proofread and fact-check your work before you publish it. Write the draft on the web, and then ping us, and we’ll look it over for you before you post it just to make sure it makes sense. I’ve worked with a few up-and-coming bloggers, and they all seem to value that initial handholding to make sure they’re not doing something crazy.
Why Is SQLServerPedia Doing It?
Our mission for SQLServerPedia is to be the community-owned resource, built by the SQL Server DBA community, for the community. There are a lot of really good bloggers out there that have gotten burned out toiling away in the dark, and I don’t want them giving up. If it’s exposure you want, we can help you get it.
Plus, SQLServerPedia has guys like me and Kevin who blog at multiple sites. Syndication just makes this whole process easier, as you’ll start to see by my own blog posts being syndicated. My SQL Server blog posts will appear at both BrentOzar.com and at SQLServerPedia.com.
Getting Your Blog Syndicated
To get started, email ask@sqlserverpedia.com. We’ll work with you to answer any questions you might have, and we can have it set up in no time.
Rob Boek January 28, 2009 | 9:44 pm
One issue I have with syndication is comments. The way it's setup right now, it seems like there are two separate places for comments. I think it would be much nicer if you could disable commenting on SQLServerPedia and somehow direct back to the original post for comments.
Brent Ozar January 28, 2009 | 9:51 pm
You bring up an interesting point. We can sorta kinda do that – we can import the permalinks along with the blog. So for example, if you clicked on the post name, you would go over to the original person's blog to read it and to post comments.
The problem is that if we do that, you lose one of the biggest benefits: the "related posts" thing at the bottom of every post. The idea is that new up-and-coming bloggers will be able to get their posts featured at the bottom of more well-known posters. They would not have that ability if the post details were at each individual site.
I do wish that something like IntenseDebate would have a unified set of comments across both SQLServerPedia and the original blogger's post, but then we have to worry about distributed spam tracking. What if a poster lets spam comments in (and I see that happen all the time on individual blogs)? I can't have the SSP comments chock full of spam.
It's a drawback, and it's a compromise between individual blogging versus syndication. I look at it this way: if you choose to go with another blogging host, like another SQL group of bloggers, then the question would be moot – there'd only be one place for comments, and it wouldn't be the domain you owned. That's how I sleep at night, anyway, ha ha ho ho.
Rob Boek January 28, 2009 | 10:26 pm
I have a few more thoughts.
It seems like the syndicated bloggers are now coming through the main SSP feed. This is causing a lot of duplicate content for me as I am already subscribed to the individual blogs. I am interesting in getting SSP news, but I'm not interesting in weeding through a ton of duplicate content just to get the occasional interesting new post.
I understand your concern about syncing comments to SSP which is why I suggested linking back to the original post to see the comments. The "related posts" widget that you mentioned doesn't seem to show up in the SSP RSS feed anyway.
Brent Ozar January 29, 2009 | 1:50 pm
First, yeah, the duplicate content is going to be a problem. I'm going to have to build a separate RSS feed for non-syndicated posts at SSP, I think.
Second, the "related posts" stuff doesn't show up in RSS. I *can* enable that, but I haven't because I wasn't sure how the community would take that. I hate seeing stuff like that in my feeds. What do you think?