Your Project, Brand, and Career: Bring Attention to Your Project or Blog
Speakers: Yolande Poirier, Kenneth Kousen (@kenkousen), Donald Raab (@TheDonRaab) & Alexa Weber Morales (@WorlWindWriting)
For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents
General
- When we blog, we are trying to create long tail content.
- Ken Kousen gave a shout out to this blog. I’d write more, but it’s be recursive 🙂 [Click here for details]
- Alexa switched from Twitter to YouTube. Didn’t transition audience.
YouTube
- Form audience member: YouTube one directional. Twitter overwhelming.
- Alexa suggested using same material on multiple channels. Ex: Convert youtube content to blog posts.
- Yolanda runs @java youtube account. Can get transcript. Alexa said kludgy. Yolanda said teh transcript isn’t good because doesn’t understand tech terms. Rev.com sells better transcript for $1/minute
- YouTube will penalize you if no written content. Be sure to tag.
- Ken has a podcast which is part of a youtube channel.
Starting
- What are you working on right now?
- Blogs are about sharing.
- Can share as learn and people see progression.
- Ken’s blog is called “stuff I’ve learned recently”
- Ken suggested thinking of blog as notes to yourself.
- Write for self. Don’t assume initial content will get read.
- Need to advertise first blog to get audience.
Blogging
- Following increases over time as more people discover it. Important to have new content out there regularly.
- Don tries to keep blog posts to a 3 minute read
- Don posts executable code
- “Whale post” – long post (ex: 2000 words). Some people will go back and update.
- People like to see their (full) name. Interviewing people will get them to read it.
- Guest posting
- Present with someone/co-author with someone – spreads there name recognition
- Blogs have stats
- “Dance like nobody is matching; Blog like you are testifying in court” – Ken
- Don blogs about open source so nobody thinks about his current work.
- Don’t need focus. The focus is you. People will Google what need and look at your other posts. Ok if they are interested or not.
- Write articles for InfoQ or DZone and follow up with blogs
- Combine topics with tags
Where publish – once or everywhere
- Medium posts can group/collect posts. Ex: Android
- Ken used WordPress blog hosted there.
- SEO = don’t repost
- Don has goal to blog at least monthly. Will sometimes post at 11:59 on last day of month.
- Ken noted can pay extra for own domain so not obvious hosted on wordpress. Also dev.to, github.io pages
- Alexa said to make sure to use a CMS so get SEO advantage
- Can set up to automatically tweet about new blog posts.
- If write newsletter, make blog post as well
- Scott noted you can pipe your blog to Amazon. [we do that]
- Alexa speculated that walled garden approach is going down. Once something viral, it’s everywhere. So harder to wall off content and require pay.
My take
The presenters have a great rapport It was a great session for the final day since it was less “technical”