Now that we’ve got more than a dozen bloggers syndicating at SQLServerPedia, we’re starting to see some good practices and ideas around syndication best practices.
Use FeedBurner’s FeedFlare To Bring Traffic to You
FeedBurner is a free Google service that takes your RSS feed, adds some super-rocket-science code to it, and then makes it available to the public. Instead of giving people a feed like this:
http://www.brentozar.com/feed/
You give them your FeedBurner feed like this:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BrentOzar-SqlServerDba
Give me that FeedBurner feed location, and I can change your syndication setup to point to that feed.
Go into the FeedBurner options under Optimize, Feed Flare. This service will automagically add links to the bottom of every one of your posts like this:
FeedBurner Feed Flare
In that example, I’ve got links for Delicious, Digg, adding a comment, sending a Tweet, and bookmarking it. But here’s the important thing: all of those links refer back to YOUR blog post on YOUR site, regardless of where the person is viewing your blog entry. Whether someone is reading your RSS feed from your site, or reading it through the SQLServerPedia syndicated feed, if they click on these links, they’re coming to your blog.
While you’re playing around in FeedBurner, you’ll notice the ability to add advertisements into your RSS feed too. Bad idea. None of us, me included, are popular enough to pull that one off – I instantly unsubscribe from any RSS feed that has ads, including commercial web sites.
In Multi-Part Articles, Link To Your Site
When you write that epic four-part series on why managers should not be allowed to schedule meetings before 9:30 AM, make sure it’s easy for users to read. At the beginning of every post in the series, link back to the post before. At the end of every post, link to the next post.
This means that you have to go back and edit each post after you’ve published the next part in the series. After all, when you publish part 1, you can’t link to part 2 since it isn’t public yet. This does create a small bit of work on your part, but it’s worth it.
This way, when people stumble across your blog post in the future, and they read one article in the series, they’ll click to Read Part 3 and come to your site – no matter where they’re reading it.
If you’re really aggressive about bringing more traffic to your site, remember that you don’t have to syndicate every article in the series. In my Index Fragmentation Findings series, for example, I didn’t syndicate part 1 of the series, but I syndicated Part 2. That way, people who are reading my syndicated feed at SQLServerPedia will see part 2 and say, “Oh, wow, I didn’t see part 1. I’ll click on that link and read it,” and bam, next thing you know, they’re at my site. It’s only a matter of time until they’re clicking on my ads for Extenze and Viagra. Schazam! I’m rich!
Don’t Syndicate Everything – Keep Some for Yourself
Add a category in your blog called “Syndication”, and tell your syndication partner (like SQLServerPedia) that you only want to syndicate those articles. Even if your blog is 100% SQL Server, all the time, you still might not want to syndicate every article. A good example of that is doing comparison reviews between multiple commercial products, or posting a complaint about a commercial production – that might not be allowed in syndication. If you only syndicate one category of your blog, you can still post things like that.
You can also keep gems for yourself: write a non-syndicated flagship post with a lot of good content, and then in your syndicated posts, keep referencing back to that flagship post on your own site. I’ve done this – but not intentionally, oddly – with my How To Get Started Blogging series. That multi-part series took me a long time to write, but I’ve linked to it more times than I can remember (and I’m purposely not linking to it today because I bet you’re as sick of seeing it as I am). These kinds of high-effort posts will reward you again and again over time.
Write a Flagship Post With Staying Power
Find something that you know forwards and backwards, something that you can talk about for an hour or two without stopping to draw a breath. A few years ago, I was using Perfmon all day long to wring every bit of performance out of servers. I didn’t find it interesting enough to blog about – I thought come on, everybody knows how to work this thing. It’s Perfmon, right? Click here, click there, game over.
I wrote a Perfmon tutorial anyway, and for years, it’s consistently drawn a steady stream of visitors. When I talk to people about performance problems and they’re trying to figure out their bottleneck, I can just say, “Go to brentozar.com/perfmon, follow the instructions, and email me the results.” That alone saves me ten minutes of explanation.
This type of flagship post is what hardcore blog geeks call “evergreen” content: it’s useful over the span of several years. I can go back to it now and then, add a few lines of updates, and it’s good to go. That post will still be useful three years from now. And you know what? I’m writing another flagship evergreen post right now – this one.
Flagship posts help readers associate you with a particular subject.
When I think partition alignment, I think Jimmy May. Jimmy has a series of articles on partition alignment that will still be useful three years from now, and that would have been useful if I’d have read them five years ago. I’ll always remember Jimmy’s site when I want partition alignment information. And here’s the funny part – when I need partition alignment info, I don’t search the web for that – I search for Jimmy May, and then I go to his site to find the info I need. That’s what flagship posts are all about, and that’s why evergreen content will help win you a long-term audience.
For better or worse, with the blogging I’ve been doing over the last month, you will probably associate me with blogging and syndication, not with SQL Server! Don’t worry – I’m already writing more SQL-related content as we speak. Well, not as we speak, but just a couple of minutes ago.
And I know what you’re thinking: how on earth did this bozo go from talking about SQL Server all the time to suddenly yapping about “flagship post” and “evergreen content”? Well, I read the manual.
How Embarrassing
RTFM: Read The Fine Manual
There are some excellent books out there on how to blog. There are also a great many poor books about it. I’d recommend ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.
I KNOW.
I know, it sounds really cheesy. It sounds like I’m endorsing a work-from-home gig. (Wait – I work from home. Damn!) Holding this book up and endorsing it might just be the low point of my professional career. And we’re talking about a guy who built a production web application with an Access 97 back end and a Classic ASP front end – in Dreamweaver.
But bear with me: it’s a really good book.
If you’re too embarrassed to have this $20 charge appear on your credit card statement (and who could blame you?) you can get an RSS feed at the ProBlogger web site, or follow ProBlogger on Twitter. Or you could pay cash for the book. Send your spouse into the bookstore for it, that works great too. But no matter how you do it, I really do recommend picking this book up – it’s helped me become a better blogger by opening my mind to ideas I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.
Choose Your Audience: Humans or Search Engines
Once you pick up books like ProBlogger and start reading about search engine techniques, it’s easy to lose focus and start obsessing over Google Analytics metrics like bounce rates and average time on page. Next thing you know, you’re writing blog posts about how to make money fast and sources for cheap online Viagra.
There’s a right way to get visitors to your blog – write good content that helps people.
There’s a wrong way to get visitors to your blog – game the search engines to fool people in.
In between, there’s a lot of gray area. For example, take Pinal Dave’s recent blog post, “SQL SERVER – Quickest Way to – Kill All Threads – Kill All User Session – Kill All Processes.” The post title is clearly designed for search engine optimization, not for human readers. It’s up to you as the blog author to decide where you want to draw the line. I can see why Pinal chooses this approach: it gets his message out to more readers, and his MVP award recognizes these efforts to educate the global community.
If you want to choose a different technique to attract readers, you might try meta tags. Meta tags are hidden elements on the web page that give search engines a clue as to what’s in your page. WordPress users can get the All in One SEO Pack Plugin, which lets you stuff as many keywords as you want in each page’s meta tags without your users seeing them. This helps improve your search engine rankings – without looking like you’re trying to improve your search engine rankings.
Add “Recommended Reading” at the Bottom of Each Post
After you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll build up a little army of articles. When you write new ones, add a “Related Articles” section at the bottom of your post that points back to some of your older posts.
These related articles may not live at your site. If you’ve written articles for another site like SQLServerCentral or MSSQLTips, you should link to those too.
Arrr Matey
That comes back to my original point in my How to Get Started Blogging series where I talked about remembering why you’re blogging: if you’re blogging for your career, then don’t be worried about sending web visitors off your site to these other places where you’ve written articles. You put a lot of work into those articles – show ‘em off!
My Opinion: Have a Personality
I know there’s bloggers who say you should blog about SQL, the whole SQL, and nothing but the SQL. They write their blog as if it’s a book: very professional, but very dry. That’s a great technique for professional authors, but for the rest of us, don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through.
Crack jokes. Tell stories about how a SQL Server technique served you well – or poorly – at work. Poke fun at yourself and at others. If Bill Graziano can get a head tattoo at PASS and live to tell about it, then you don’t have to keep a completely straight face on your blog either.
Having a personality helps you stand out from the army of faceless, boring bloggers that drone on and on about dry technical stuff. If your readers wanted that, they’d go buy a book.
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