Beyond Portfolios

I'm convinced that forward-thinking executives have to brand themselves online, and I'm equally convinced that job seekers and career experts alike are woefully slow to understand how important this is. At Blue Sky Resumes, we were one of the first to offer online portfolios, and I'm also a strong advocate for blogging as a means to demonstrate expertise (In fact, I think a well-written blog is more effective than a portfolio because it allows you to show rather than tell.)

But blogs have some serious limitations. First, they only work for people who can write well and frequently. There's nothing worse for your online brand than a blog that hasn't been updated in months. Secondly, the structure of a blog means that you can't be sure what first impression you'll make. Will it be your smart and insightful post on brand marketing, or the entry you made just after your team lost the Superbowl and you'd had one too many beers?

That's why I'm really interested in two new tools that present job seekers with a different way to establish themselves as experts.

I've already been playing around with  Squidoo which was founded by Seth Godin and describes itself as:

an online platform that makes it easy for anyone to build lenses on topics they are passionate about. These lenses help you find a unique, human perspective on things that interest you... fast. Not only can Lensmasters spread their ideas, get recognized for their expertise, and send more traffic to their Web sites and blogs—they could also earn royalties.

Squidoo is amazingly easy to use. Here's an Executive Job Search Lens I created in one hour.

Hubpages sounds like a similar concept although it hasn't entered Beta testing yet, so I haven't had the chance to try it out. According to the founders:

Here at Hubpages we want everyone to share their passion to benefit others. Whether it be traveling right, tweaking your engine, or finding the ultimate deal, we let you share your genius with the world and enjoy the expert advice of others.

Just pick a topic and use our simple publishing tools to create a great looking website with rich functionality. Hubpages takes it from there. The site is designed to continually sort out the most useful pages, helping to build traffic and revenue for our highest quality authors.

Yes revenue! Although knowledge is its own reward, we thought you might also like cold hard cash. So, if your readers generate revenue by clicking on an ad, buying a product or generating a lead, you will earn a share of the profits.

Revenue is nice of course, but I think it's much less important than the opportunity to build a strong personal brand.