marketing

Tech Content Creators Will Have a New Job This Year

January 2, 2025

Yves uses a few Chinese social media platforms to keep up with her friends back home, and I often see stuff on there while she’s doing things. I don’t speak or read any Chinese whatsoever, but between what I’ve just seen visually, and what Yves & I have discussed, one thing is extremely clear to me. Chinese platforms leverage their comments in interesting ways. For example, on Chinese equivalents of YouTube, comments are overlaid atop the video player itself, encouraging even more interactivity. At first this sounds horribly distracting, but in a matter of minutes of seeing it in action, I…

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Introducing Myself to My Peers

May 11, 2024

marketing

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Teachable.com, the platform I use for online training sales, has an annual meetup for their top sellers where we get together and share techniques. This year, each attendee is giving a 5-minute intro talk about what we do and our biggest tip, so I recorded mine when I rehearsed it, and I’m sharing it here just for posterity: I would assume most regular visitors here on my personal site already know what I do, but if you’re new around here, welcome! Here are a few of my favorite resources on the topic of inbound marketing: The Basics of Personal Branding…

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Building the BrentOzar.com 2020 Black Friday Sale

November 13, 2020

black friday, business, marketing

Seven years ago, I ran the first Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com just for fun. I always like shopping for stuff like TVs around this time of year, even if I don’t actually buy anything – it’s just a fun diversion for looking. However, it caught on with consumers in a big way, so over the years, it became a really big deal for the business. In 2018, we crossed the half-million dollar mark, and then things got better in 2019 as well. Every year, leading up to the sale, I put a lot of thought into two things: What…

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Behind the Scenes: Open Sourcing sp-Blitz

June 21, 2016

business, first responder kit, marketing, open source, sp_Blitz

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Yesterday, we announced that we open-sourced a bunch of our SQL Server tools. I say “yesterday,” but I’m writing this weeks in advance because a lot of thought and planning went into this. Here, I’m going to give you the behind-the-scenes story as a small business guy. sp-Blitz and friends were successful. About five years ago, I launched sp_Blitz onstage at the PASS Summit. I wanted to really blow the attendees’ minds by giving them a tool that would make their lives way easier. It worked – that session was voted #2 of the Summit overall. That script inspired more scripts:…

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Video: How to Become a Consultant or Contractor

June 2, 2016

branding, consulting, marketing, videos

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I presented a webcast this week for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter covering how to get into consulting or contracting. You can watch it now on YouTube: If you like that session, you’ll probably enjoy my past blog posts on consulting & contracting.

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Secret Meeting Minutes for the SQL Server on Linux Decision*

March 7, 2016

marketing, SQL Server

After today’s bombshell announcement that a subset of SQL Server functionality will run on Linux, I got curious and went dumpster diving. I hopped a flight over to Seattle, rummaged through the dumpster in Redmond, and found a shredded set of meeting notes. It took a long time to piece together, but here we go: Manager: (raps table) “Alright, let’s call this meeting to order. We need to raise the market share of SQL Server. This is the new Microsoft, people. Anything is possible. Let’s think about the truly new and unique. What can we do?” Rand: “People have complained about core-based…

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Behind the Scenes of Launching the Office Hours Podcast

January 5, 2016

marketing, podcast, podcasting

At work, we do this weekly Office Hours webcast where people can register, then join a GoToWebinar where we just sit around and answer their questions. It’s half an hour every Wednesday. But if you’re not there live, you miss the whole thing. We used to try recording it, but it was kind of a pain in the rear. We had to set up a separate laptop as an attendee, set up screen recording software, record it, then afterwards edit it down, and upload it to YouTube. We didn’t want to hassle our employees with doing that kind of thing – we…

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The Basics of Personal Branding

November 3, 2015

branding, marketing

Sales and marketing boils down to these four things: A product – in this case, your skills A brand – what you want people to think of when they think of your product Marketing – getting people to think what you want them to think Sales – getting them to fork over money for your product When most people enter the job market, they only have a product – but no brand or marketing. As a result, their sales effort is hard as hell. With every single sales attempt, you have to convince the hiring managers that your product is the…

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Book Review: The Mom Test by @RobFitz

August 4, 2015

book review, business, marketing

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If you’re thinking about offering something – a piece of software, a service, training, or an e-book – you need to know if people are going to buy it. (And buy includes free stuff, because it costs their time.) Getting the truth is surprisingly hard. I used to think I’d just flat out ask people and they’d be honest with me, especially if I explained that I needed their honesty because I was about to place a big bet on it. Instead, it turns out people want to say yes because they don’t want to insult you and they figure…

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Launching an Online Course: Behind the Scenes

June 23, 2015

business, life quest, marketing, training

Friday, Kendra and I launched our newest online training course, The DBA’s Guide to SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Here’s a quick glimpse behind the scenes at the work required in launching something like this. Designing and Building the Course Materials November – Course design started – Kendra wrote a profile for the ideal attendee, describing her experience, job duties, and current pain points. This determined the material we’d cover – and the stuff we’d ignore. For example, Kendra wrote, “What’s NOT included? How to install these things. I can figure out how to run a wizard.” November – EU…

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marketing

Hi. I’m Brent.