marketing

Inbound Marketing: Selling With Your Personality & Blogging

January 13, 2015

I bet you hate salespeople. Yeah, for the most part, me too. Bad news: if you start consulting, you’re gonna have to sell your time. You have to figure out how to talk people into signing a contract that says, “We’re going to do ___ for you, and you’re going to pay us $___.” Both of those blanks are completely up for negotiation, and frankly, your customers are in a better negotiating position than you. Would you buy a slightly used consultant from this man? Good news: if you put some work into your company from the start, the sales process doesn’t…

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How to End Every User Group and Conference Presentation

December 9, 2014

marketing, presenting

“To learn more, go here.” Say this while pointing at the screen, which is displaying a short link to a page on your blog. That page has your list of resources – not just things you’ve written, but things you find interesting about the topic. Why? Because you just got done presenting about a topic you love, and you’ve gotten the audience excited about it too. They already picked your session because they needed help with something, and you’ve shown a few ways to get started. Now they see you as an expert, and they want to keep the learning going.…

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My Favorite WordPress Tools: 2014 Edition

November 11, 2014

blogging, marketing, wordpress

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I keep my How to Start a Blog post updated, but here’s some of the more advanced tools I’ve been using lately. These aren’t really install-and-go – they require a weekend of work to set up and configure in total, but the payoff is worth it. MailChimp email subscriptions – free for up to 2,000 subscribers, and really reasonable above that. MailChimp makes it easy for people to keep up with you by watching your RSS feed for updates, then sending those updates as nicely formatted emails to your mailing list. Plus, when you want to promote something else like an…

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On Business

October 28, 2014

business, career, consulting, marketing

Quick background: I started BrentOzar.com as a blog over a decade ago, and today it’s a successful consulting company that gets tens of thousands of spam comments per day. I failed at a few other side projects before that. This post is a brain dump for IT people who are thinking about starting their own thing. Most of the people who start businesses do it for the love of what they do, not because they want to go into finance, sales, and management. Most founders (myself included) have no idea what they’re getting into. That doesn’t mean they’ll fail, though, because passion…

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Announcing the New Business Analytics Conference

September 17, 2014

analytics, marketing, sqlpass

(Dear reader – PASS just announced a few changes to BAC 2015. The strangely-worded announcement is already causing a hubbub on Twitter, and I thought, “There’s gotta be a way to say this stuff clearly and positively.” So I’m taking a shot at it – here goes. Keep in mind that I have nothing to do with the BAC, I’ve never attended it, and I don’t even know why they’re doing this stuff. I’m making this up as I go.) Our annual PASS Summit is an incredible, mature event for data professionals. Every year, we’re lucky enough to get thousands of…

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The Kardashian Approach to Becoming an IT Celebrity

August 19, 2014

blogging, career, marketing, presenting

So you want to be “Internet Famous” in the IT community, but you don’t want to spend your mornings and weekends slaving away on the work I described in my last post? I’ve got good news – there’s an easier way. Think About Celebrities You “Know” If you’re like me, you watch television, and you’d count some/many/most of the people on TV as celebrities, for various values of celebrity. For example, I was walking down a New Orleans street after dark once and saw Josh Harris, now skipper of the Cornelia Marie, a crab boat on the show Deadliest Catch. He had…

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What If You Want to Be “Internet Famous?”

August 12, 2014

blogging, career, marketing, presenting

There’s a lot of reasons to blog, present, and build a brand – get a better job, change careers, raise your billable rate – but what if you just want to be known by name amongst the community? I was chatting with a blogger about how to be successful, and the first step was defining what success meant to him. One of his goals was to be recognized when he walked into a conference – but he didn’t want to “be famous for being famous,” like a Kardashian kind of thing. I know some of you are going to cringe,…

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This Year’s YouTube, Web, and Twitter Analytics

August 5, 2014

blogging, marketing, mvp

Every year, Microsoft MVPs have to fill out some paperwork describing what they did on their summer vacation. Each time I do this, the numbers boggle my mind, so I’m sharing some of the fun ones with you data junkies. (These numbers aren’t necessarily the ones I use on my community contribution forms because they reflect things the whole company is doing, not just me.) YouTube Channel Stats We record our weekly webcasts and post them up on our YouTube channel. You people continue to watch them in crazy numbers: YouTube Channel Stats That’s 49,452 hours of video watching time…

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Why I Keep Speaking at User Groups and SQLsaturdays

April 29, 2014

consulting, marketing, presenting

Badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges badges MUSHROOM MUSHROOM Before I did a lot of speaking, I assumed there were two types of speakers. One group just loved volunteering to help people. The other group was a bunch of money-hungry people that wanted to talk attendees out of their wallets. Now that I do a lot more speaking, I don’t just assume that this is true – I am convinced it’s true. For example, I accidentally sat in a vendor session at SQLSaturday Chicago, and I was flabbergasted by the blatant advertising – frankly, hucksterism – coming from…

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Training Products are the New Blogs

September 17, 2013

consulting, marketing, presenting, training, videos

In the old days, when you wanted to learn about photography or you bought a new gadget, you went to the bookstore – in person – and you bought a book. Maybe if you had some spare time, you joined a local user group, and if you had all kinds of time, you’d sign up for a college course. Over the last several years, the consumer gadget training market – yes, there actually is such a thing – has evolved at a breakneck pace. When you want to learn photography, you’ve got some amazing options: Free email newsletters like Photojojo…

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marketing

Hi. I’m Brent.