Happy Tuesday everyone…
In early 2017 I started blogging on this site in hopes of sharing new technology I was learning. The first post was as you could guess, a hello world blog. I was not consistent with posting, I tried to get blogs out every few weeks. When I attended my first PASS Summit in 2019 I wrote a recap blog post. Then things went quiet! Maybe it was due to burnout or other things that were going on in my life, but blogging was not a priority.
In July I decided and committed to working on growing my blog readership. Since then I have posted a blog every Tuesday on different topics and technologies that I have been working with or that interest me. There are other steps I have done to try and gain viewers. Below I will outline a few of the steps that I have taken to accomplish this growth.
Syndication
I joined the SQLServerCentral blog syndication program. What this means is that when I post a blog it is listed on the site and also shows up in their daily newsletter. This helps expand who sees my new posts. They also do tweets to help market blogs that are syndicated through the site.
Slack
I am a member of the SQL Server Community on Slack. There is a #Blog channel that is used for members to post their blog posts. There are currently 574 members who have joined the channel, but the full 13k members can view the blogs that have been syndicated.
Subscriber
One thing I am still working to get implemented is a new subscriber section for getting people to join. I have added a section on the blog to easily allow readers to join using their e-mail. I plan to add a weekly newsletter once I get that part figured out.
Analytics
After getting started and implementing some of these changes there have been some consistent viewers when I post new blogs. My goal is to hit 50 viewers a day and there have been successful days and some not so much.
Social Media
When a new blog post goes live I post a tweet from my account. One of the new things I have done is to start also posting to LinkedIn. This has grown my readership from my business network that I have built on that platform.
For Twitter, I include the #SQLNewBlogger hashtag to reach a wider audience. I only use this tool when the blog topic is related to SQL Server.
Bonus – Ozar effect
There is one thing I wanted to point out and applaud. Brent Ozar ( b | t ) has a newsletter that goes out to his subscribers weekly. Occasionally good content catches his attention and he makes a note. Then if you are lucky you might make the list. I have called this the Ozar effect because you will see a spike in blog stats. Two of my blog posts have made this list and I bet you can see when that occurred on the chart above.
Conclusion
I enjoy writing blogs and it gives me an outlet for sharing some work that I do daily. It is exciting to see the numbers grow and how I might be helping people looking to solve similar issues I run across.
Happy reading!!!
If you found this blog handy, please use the Subscribe section at the top of the screen to join my newly created mailing list. I hope to start delivering content via the mailing list soon. 
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