Jeff Smith on blogging & my thoughts

Do you blog?  Are you thinking of blogging?  Do you like THAT Jeff Smith and his Oracle SQL Developer tool?  If you answered yes to any of these, I would check out Jeff's LinkedIn post about what he learned by blogging for 30 days in a row.  I am not sure how many days in a row I have blogged now, I am trying for an entire year without missing a day, but I would add these to his bulleted list:

Blogging consistently makes you learn consistently.  Ever get that question about what you would tell your self years ago if you could travel through time?  I would give my younger self the advice to start blogging from my first moment on the job not only because of the opportunities like presenting that might come, or being more involved in the Oracle community, but because it would force me to get engaged and learn each and every day.

The more technical your content, the more hits you get.  I thought I had a lot of hits when I went to Hotsos in March since I finally broke the 2000 hits/month milestone, but the past 2 months have seen me hit well over 3500 hits/month due to the more technical content I have shared which was full of error messages and 12c specific information.  This month?  A lot less technical content/keywords which can be picked up by search engines so my metrics are trending for less than 3000 hits/month for October.

You need to understand what your social input bandwidth threshold is.  That is a lot of words for "do not get overwhelmed by all the stuff out there" because once you have a blog list, it will grow.  When you get on LinkedIn, your network will grow.  If you start Tweeting, you will have a lot of followers/followees/content to dig through.  Quickly, you can get overrun by input and start turning a deaf ear towards them in order to "get control".

Decide if you want to use images to enhance or show what you are talking about.  There are a lot of great blogs out there that use images to teach or reference and that is fantastic for what they are doing, or they regularly have images which really make me think of them as more professional than the pure text posts I do on a regular basis.

Do not depend on a single source for content.  If you have been visiting the blog for a while you will probably have noticed that right now I am really picking on a particular source for a lot of content right now.  That is probably related to my third point tonight, as there are just SO many inputs out there it is easy to target in on one source and keep riding it until you (or your audience) get bored with it.  I am going to try and break that trend over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

So from Jeff's list, I would say I have followed #1, #3, #5, #6 (since Google does not charge), and #8 with this post.  :}