VCDX133.COM One Year In

VCDX133.COM went live exactly one year ago after I achieved my VCDX certification.  This review post is for vBloggers who want some ideas on how to get started and increase their readership.

VCDX133.COM, the low-down:

• Views per month: Started at 700 and hit 32K last month
• Number of posts: 164 (average of 3 per week)
• Reader origin: USA, UK
• First advertiser: VMTurbo in November 2014
• Top vBlog results: #37
• Best day of the week (for traffic): Tuesday
• Worst days of the week (for traffic): Saturday and Sunday
• Worst months (for traffic): November and December
• Most Popular Posts: Cisco UCS Configuration Guide for vSphere, EMC Symmetrix VMAX – Provisioning a LUN, NSX Link-O-Rama, vSphere 6.0 Basics
• Deep Dive subjects: VCDX, Architecture Design & Strategy
• Configuration Guide subjects: Cisco UCS, vSphere 5.5, vSphere 6.0
• Link-O-Rama subjects: VMware NSX, Nutanix NPX

Initially my posts were about Architecture Design and VCDX Deep Dives and I did not understand why my traffic was not increasing.  A vBlogger friend suggested writing How-To configuration guides as well because the audience for Deep Dives is very small and immediately my traffic doubled.  The majority of the audience for virtualisation blogs are looking for information to help them in their jobs RIGHT NOW.  They want information that is easy to understand and implement.

Insights on getting started and increasing your readership:

• Put in the hard work, an average of 3 posts per week
• Produce content that you are passionate about
• Select a niche area that has zero public content, become the go-to site for that subject
• Schedule your posts from Tuesday to Thursday and only release one post per day
• Keep your blog layout as simple as possible
• Use a conversational style of writing that is very easy to read and understand
• Provide a mix of How-To, Configuration Guides, Link-O-Rama and Deep Dive posts
• If you are a non-native English speaker, use spell-check or get someone to review your posts
• Register with news aggregators like Planet v12n and 1CloudRoad
• Get your name out there:
  • Present at vCommunity events
  • Sign-up to be a guest with vCommunity podcasts
  • Use Twitter to communicate with the vCommunity
• Get sponsored and put that income back into your vBlog activities
• Link your posts to other vBloggers, the ping-backs do increase traffic

Additional Resources:

• Tech101 – Successful Blogging
• Tech101 – Ads with Hosted WordPress
• Tech101 – Easy To Read Blogs
• #TopvBlog2015 Analysis Part 1
• #TopvBlog2015 Analysis Part 2