I am very pleased to announce today that I have decided to launch my very own youtube channel. I have been writing content on this blog for a long time which is mostly a dumping place for my own personal thoughts, my intention is also to share my knowledge but more or less this blog is my own personal space. I am planning not to post directly on social networking sites directly and I am trying to implement POSSE on my blog where I will post small or big post here and syndicate them elsewhere.
So why I am starting this channel?
Very long time ago (7 years ago) I did make some videos on Drupal but I was not prepared back then, although I never really wanted to become a youtuber and that is not what I still want. I also don't intend to earn money from this blog and become a millionaire.
1. Self improvement
A majority of my work involves talking to people, presenting solutions to them. Talking about technology. The domain I work in is quite huge, apart from wide range of tools I am also expected to know a lot about processes. Having this youtube channel will give me the opportunity to learn more about various technologies, not expert level but at least enough so that I can apply it on my job. For instance my main competency is Atlassian tools and Drupal however you if someone asks you for an advice around best practices around Agile or DevOps then you are expected to know about lot of other things. I will continue to write which is my main passion I will make regular videos for the youtube channel. I also intent to improve my presentation and communication skills. The more opportunities you get to speak, the better you become.
2. Self marketing - Show your worth
I can't even tell you how many people from all over the world reach out to me who find my blog after searching on the internet. For some keywords my blog is actually on top in some locations, which is quite good for me because I used to also get lot of direct leads. When people come to your site, they read not only the article they found but they also read your profile and know about your services. My intention was never to build a huge business, but build a company where we adhere to the values, make decent money but most importantly do what we like. In a small company you want to optimize the expenses and save money. There was a time when I thought that I will outsource the marketing activities to a digital agency but I realized I am much better doing it myself and we were actually digital marketing agency for ourselves.
We learn a lot about SEO and making some keywords appear on top ;) without spending any money. It took us many years to build a network of sites and good user base. We also used that learning to help promoting some of our clients but we never did digital marketing as a main business.
In the past few years, especially last 1 year I have personally seen youtube as a very good medium to promote yourself. My intention with marketing is not to earn money or 1 millionaire subscribers. Even few thousand will do for me. I just can't ignore youtube. Although it is against the POSSE strategy but videos are huge and upload them on your own site with dedicated server for serving videos will be an overkill plus I also want to leverage the userbase on youtube.
Any professional be in job or business should make sure that they pay attention to their online presence. Having a website in my opinion is a must but apart from that you should have an handy proof to show your worth. It could be a link to your videos, slideshare presentations or Github profile. Do whatever is relevant to you and your work.
What kind of videos will I be posting?
I don't like labelling. I never liked people calling me a Drupal developer or now in 2018 as an Atlassian expert. No matter how good I become in a particular technology or domain I do not like to be labelled. It is ok to be very, very good in just one thing but personally I feel it is much valuable to be good in 4 to 5 things. For me it is definitely Jira, Drupal, Linux, Writing and Training. These are some skills which I know I am very good at and I continue to enhance those skills. These are required for my day to day work. Lately in the last 1 year I am not really using Drupal but I do use it a lot for my personal blog.
So I will be posting videos that will continue enhance my current skill set. Having said that I am also focussing on DevOps a lot. It is quite in thing in the market these days. So I will definitely be upload videos where I will share my learning. For instance recently I uploaded one video on Go programming language which is quite relevant to DevOps and backend engineering.
Who should subscribe to my youtube channel
If you are into DevOps, Agile and Software Development then I think this channel will be useful. I feel the target audience can be of any level. I will try to use descriptive titles with the experience level required to understand the videos. If there are series of videos then I will link them together so that you can follow them properly in the right order.
I will also be creating a dedicated section on this site for all these videos grouped by their topic areas.
What else?
Apart from this blog, youtube channel I also plan to start sharing lot of code on Github. I still need work on my Github profile and will be sharing the link in separate post soon.
Recently I also started posting the slides on Slideshare. This is I know against the POSSE strategy but I realized that I can use the userbase there and also people can use my presentations if they want.
Almost 2 months of this year have passed. I usually get sick in March every year. May be it is because of the pollens. I thought I will not get sick here in London. March is spring time (except last few days in London) and it is a nice time to start something new.
Have a very nice and don't forget to have fun ;)
