Most DBAs don’t read blogs.
They have “real jobs” that don’t afford them the time to surf the web, improve their training, or meet like-minded SQL Server professionals who want to help. When I talk to them about the power of the community and all this free help that’s available, they’re often completely surprised.
I think it has to do with the lonely nature of the DBA career. We usually stumble into this job by accident. We start as developers or network administrators, and for some odd reason we end up managing a SQL Server because nobody else is doing it. We tinker around with it, learn a lot of lessons the hard way, and struggle finding good training.
How Quest and SQLServerPedia Are Making a Difference
At the beginning of this year, we announced that SQLServerPedia would offer blog syndication. We knew that a lot of bloggers were writing top-notch material, but they weren’t getting the exposure they deserved. We wanted to help bloggers get their work to a wider audience.
Now, we’re kicking it up a notch. Here’s the CPU diagnostics screen inside Quest Spotlight on SQL Server v6, and check out the links at the bottom right:
Quest Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise
When you’re trying to troubleshoot a complex issue like CPU bottlenecks due to insufficient plan cache reuse, or too many adhoc queries running, you need help. So when you click on those links….
SQLServerPedia Search Results
You’re introduced to community members, bloggers, wiki authors, and other folks who want to share their knowledge with you.
This is a completely new way that syndication pays off for bloggers. When you cover topics users don’t understand, you can show up on end user screens everywhere. We’re only including our syndicated blogs in this search.
How Bloggers Can Benefit
In my Syndication FAQ for Bloggers, I talked about some ways you can leverage syndication to bring more readers to your site. These tips include:
- Include links to your other posts. When someone’s reading one of your posts, that’s your chance to bring them deeper into your site. For example, in this very blog post just a couple of lines above, I linked to my own syndication FAQ, and I’m going to do it again in a second.
- Include sample code. If you’re discussing table partitioning, for example, include the scripts to demonstrate what you’re talking about. The more scripts you include, the more likely someone will stumble across your blog entry when they’ve got questions about a particular command.
- Toot your own horn. If you’re a consultant and you happen to specialize in the area you’re blogging about, include a footer on every post with links to contact you for more information. FeedBurner makes this particularly easy.
- Include affiliate links to books. If you’re a big fan of a particular book to dive deeper into the blog post’s subject matter, include an Amazon Affiliate link to buy the book. You get paid 4% of the Amazon purchase, and if you’re an author, this is above and beyond your normal cut of the proceeds.
- Read your web statistics reports. Every now and then, dig into your reports to find out if one of your posts has become popular. If it has, update it to include more links to your other posts, as I discussed in my Buried Treasure Blog Posts article.
To read more tips like this, check out my Syndication FAQ for Bloggers. See how I did that? 
Suggested Topics for Maximum Exposure
If you’d like some ideas on topics to write about, here’s a sampling of the keywords used as SQLServerPedia search links:
- Adhoc Queries
- Blocking
- Buffer Cache
- CPU Bottleneck
- Memory
- Performance Counters
- Plan Cache Reuse
- Procedure Cache
- Query Optimization
- Query Plan Hash
- Query Plan Parallel
- Query Plan Sort
- Query Tuning
If you wanted to get more exposure to more readers, you might look for keywords with less competition. You could hit those links, see what kinds of results they bring back, and figure out how you could write something better.
When writing, keep in mind that SQLServerPedia can’t syndicate posts about third party products – and that includes Quest’s own products. SQLServerPedia has a very firm editorial policy because we focus strictly on things you can do with the native SQL Server tools. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that this particular post isn’t syndicated to SSP, for example, but it IS syndicated somewhere else – and I’ll talk more about that soon!
