IT Writer, Blogger, Expert ….. the IT Guy. This ESX Virtualization Blog has started a few years ago as a simple bookmarking site. As an IT guy, I needed to have my bookmarks online to remember stuff, configuration of different products and also have the latest Free tools referenced somewhere. That's why an ESX Virtualization website was born. I took a domain with my own surname – Vladan – and since I'm French, the website runs at www.vladan.fr
Curiously I asked to have vladan.com, but it was unavailable and the person asked for $2000. The money I certainly wanted to spend better way… -:). Anyway, the blog was born and I started to put on articles. The first articles were not polished enough, my English was poor and I was writing with a lot of typos. Great that some peers bloggers noticed and helped me out to correct that (Duncan, thx). But recently I have reached 1300 unique articles of being published.
So for me, the blogging adventure started with a principal objective to have my stuff out there, for my own purposes. But, then some traffic started to flow in and I thought, OK, let put some more in so I'll get some more traffic etc.. And it goes this way since. Daily updates is a must. I fixed myself the daily updates as an objective, as a target. No matter what happens, I have a daily article. There are of course some exceptions, but as a rule, I'm hard enough to myself and I'm not letting myself being lazy and so I just write.
Blog as a communication tool
Now, this blog has some Subscribers via RSS, some people follow me via Twitter or Facebook. My e-mail list launched recently too has got already over 600 subscribers too. I think that being a highly specialized today in this world of over-information is a must. Young bloggers might get themselves discouraged easily, but I say that it's still possible to start a successful blog today. A highly specialized niche must be targeted, though. Being too general might not capture enough traffic from search engines.
A blog is a perfect tool to communicate your thoughts and your ideas too. You might be seeking a job or in a period when you just seeking better, more paid job too. Being able to communicate on that through your blog can open other doors and other perspectives too. Being communicative and open enough is what good for your image.
Blog as a business?
Yes, there are individuals, internet marketers which manage to drive enough traffic and make their living just on that. Those internet marketers might not be in the IT business as a consultants or enterprises, but more or less like sales mans, which are trying to sell you whatever works for them.
But blogging business can be quite different in the IT industry. The blogging business is more about services. Paid writing services for example. As long as the paid review which is ordered by a vendor is clearly mentioned before or at the end of the article. I don't think that helping a vendor to test a product in my lab is a bad think. Do a test, report on how is the look and feel of the product, what is working and what sucks. It's important for the vendor to know that the product is good, excellent or that there is still a feature which needs some polishing for the next future release…-:)
Wrap Up.
Yes, I think that being blogger which at the same time works for the IT industry where consulting services completes the full circle, is a real way of being profitable. As for every business, even the IT blogger, especially blogger which writes about virtualization, needs a lab. And to build a lab there are many ways of doing it. A small (portable) vSphere Lab can be built quite cheap and on a laptop/desktop with limited resources. You can get my free E-book where I'm showing the way of doing it.
An 8Gigs of RAM and one SSD with at least 64Gb storage space can do the trick. A vSphere lab with nested ESXi hosts where one can test several scenarios and configurations. Note that nested lab might run a bit slow than a real lab, but you can always start with nested lab and then, if necessary, migrate your workflow into the real lab.
I hope that young bloggers with less blogging experiences find some information needed for them to get started. Further this year I'm preparing some guest posting guidelines, which might be interesting for bloggers with a blog which is less known in the IT industry, or with a new blog with less traffic. I'm actually thinking about how to manage those blog posts coming from guest bloggers and especially on how to put some incentive to their writing effort.
Also from ESX Virtualization
- Free Tools
- VMware vSphere 6.5 Configuration Maximums
- How to create a USB media with ESXi 6.5 Installation
- vSphere 6.5 page with ALL How-to, videos and blog articles for vSphere 6.5, ESXi 6.5
Stay tuned through RSS, and social media channels (Twitter, FB, YouTube)
