Love Technical Writing

How to support your favorite tech and cybersecurity authors

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An opportunity arose that caused me to work on a home project and during that time nearly depleted all my pre-written posts on my latest blog series — automating cybersecurity metics. I’m trying to catch up and get that going again. But I finally have my house back in a state where I can teach cloud security classes remotely (for the moment! Yippee!)

I jump between topics in my blog as anyone who’s followed me for a while is aware. Whatever is pressing for the business at the moment or cybersecurity in general takes precedence. I can never seem to finish what I start because an actual paying project comes up and that takes priority. But wouldn’t it be great if I could just finish what I started?!

I am about to teach an Azure class so I need to switch gears and focus on that for a while, starting with a few network changes. I’ll be writing about that for a minute. I summarized my network security blog posts in the last published post and you can find that in the list below as well.

Writing for Business

My first business circa 1994 was a writing business I named “The Write Connection.” I wrote about that and how I switched to tech here:

I write because I love to write. But at some point everyone needs to earn a living. I just read a post by someone complaining about technical blog posts that try to sell you something. Ironic, because the person writing that post frequently emails opportunities to buy marketing swag, etc. and includes ads in his newsletters. We all need to earn a living somehow. (Don’t we? I do.)

Compensation for Blogs

I’m not really expecting compensation for these posts but if anyone appreciates them I’ve written about a few ways to compensate your favorite tech writers below.

One of the reasons I write is because I hope the work leads to other forms of payment through my cybersecurity company. My website is sorely out of date. Someday I’ll get around to fixing that. I do teach virtual classes though my website says otherwise. I only teach to organizations, not individuals, at this time. If your organization is interested in a class, a penetration test, or a security assessment you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Although I love writing and research, I did have to stop writing a few time consuming series of posts that took too long and didn’t result in additional income when putting them behind the Medium paywall. In fact, I really don’t want to put my posts behind a paywall — not only because the Medium paywall is currently easy to bypass (I am a pentester, after all, so I notice these things), but also because I want people to find them when searching in Google. As a result, Medium doesn’t pay much.

But I do get paid a tiny bit (compared to my consulting and training work) based on the time people spend reading my posts and paid memberships.

The paid membership option is not the best model because obviously someone can only sign up for a paid membership once so whatever post they read first that triggered them to do that go compensated and none of the authors they read after that. However, if you’re not a member yet and want to join you can do so here:

As far as time spent reading posts I’m not sure how Medium calculates that because I know more people read my posts than what they list in their stats. I can tell based on the comments people make on other social media platforms. They even quote what I’ve written — and yet Medium says only 1 or 2 people read each post. I’m not sure if it’s based on time or cookies or something. It doesn’t pay me enough to bother figuring that out and I’ve got too much to finish writing!

Update: I found this link on “reads” on Medium:

I finally signed up for Buy Me a Coffee. This is an interesting model and I’m curious to see if it actually results in any income. I know so many people put useful code and writing online and it’s hard to support everyone but if you have a favorite technical writer or developer this is a great way to show that you appreciate their work.

I recently learned you can “tip” people on Twitter and enabled that feature, but I’m not holding my breath on that income either. I just realized you can’t even see the teeny tiny “tip” icon in the browser but you can in IOS app. I am not aware of any tips since enabling that feature.

I read about a new option coming called Post. It’s supposed to be a new form of social media by a form Google VP who went on to be the CEO of Waze for a number of years. Something to keep an eye on. I’m curious what it will have to offer. If you want to sign up for the waiting list you can do it here.

I’ve also been reading about a site called Vocal but I’m not sure it caters to technical writing. I’ve also not seen it appear ever I don’t think in search engine rankings when searching for technical topics. Maybe I’ll try it some day.

More books!

I’m planning to write more books as time allows and expand on what I’ve written on so stay tuned for that. I’ve already written one and purchasing that for yourself or others helps fund additional writing.

Using what I’ve written about to generate income

I intend to actually use what I’m writing about in my most recent series on automating cybersecurity metrics for penetration tests and security assessments. I’m just sharing how I develop it along the way. We’ll see how that works out and if I can ever finish it.

Blogs and Open Source Code are FREE!

I don’t understand open source developers who turn to malicious actions when their code they shared for free is used by big companies. If you put it out there for free don’t be like that. I have a license from my lawyer on my source code. If people want to use it to make money, they need to license it. If I find out they are doing otherwise, I will have words with my lawyer, not sabotage the code I put out there for free.

All my blogs are free, but copyrighted. That means don’t blatantly copy them but you are free to read, use, and reference them as long as you credit the source properly and aren’t copying them word for word. If you are interested in perusing a topic on my blog you may have previously missed, please check out the links to the series of posts below here:

I’ll keep trying to keep the post coming regularly but there may be pause on the current series while I switch from AWS back to Azure for a minute. Of course, I want to write about GCP and a bunch of other topics too. Not enough time in a day. More soon. Follow for updates.

Follow for updates.

Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2022

About Teri Radichel:
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⭐️ Author: Cybersecurity Books
⭐️ Presentations: Presentations by Teri Radichel
⭐️ Recognition: SANS Award, AWS Security Hero, IANS Faculty
⭐️ Certifications: SANS ~ GSE 240
⭐️ Education: BA Business, Master of Software Engineering, Master of Infosec
⭐️ Company: Penetration Tests, Assessments, Phone Consulting ~ 2nd Sight Lab

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