Blogging As a Career Tool

Quite often I am asked by job seekers how they can use blogging to further their career or help in their job search. This Fast Company article goes some way to shed some light on the practice.

What they fail to cover is the majority of people (there are only 12 million blog owners in North America after all !) who do not want to run their own blog, but would still like to a part of the blogging explosion and benefit from its power in their career marketing.

If you want to use blogging as a way to start to build your on line personal brand and are not ready to take the leap to your own blog take the following actions:

1. Go to places such as Technorati or Google Blog Search and keyword around for blogs that are relevant to your vocation or industry or passions - where ever you want to be known as the expert or specialist.
2. Bookmark them, or better still add them to somewhere like Bloglines and check in once a week to see who has added new comments to their blog.
3. Take 30 minutes (or less) a week reading those new postings.
4. If there are posts where you feel you can make a valuable contribution to the discussion click on Comments and make them. Remember to be credible and transparent (would you want to see what you said appear on the front page of your local newspaper?).
5. Watch your on line brand build as each comment becomes a separate piece on the web, and may even start to show up on your Google rankings.

Posted by Paul Copcutt

Comments

[Patricia Foster]

I have been using bloglines for most of this year to keep track of the blogs of key players in the industries I'm interested in (in my town). I've been able to find out about many networking opportunities/clubs/groups/socials that aren't necessarily advertised via normal channels(such as the local business newspaper). I've met quite a few people this way and I've increased my list of contacts in my career interest area.

The other way I use blogs is to help prepare for conferences. Most conferences now have websites with bios of the speakers and usually a link to that person's website/blog. In this way I can find out a bit more about what their topics and if I have any questions I can post them on their blogs or send a little email. If you sometimes feel nervous walking into a conference of unfamiliar faces and networking doing this prep work helps immensely.

[JibberJobber Guy]

Paul, this is good advice. As a blogger I like to link back to other blogs, and I like those blogs to link in to me. I think you can have a successful blog/branding strategy with what you are doing but I would only recommend someone set up their own blog so they can share the link love. They don't have to update it as regularly, or can say "go check out this link"... however, I recommend that bloggers that want to establish and build their personal brand have some meat that someone can sink their teeth into. ... While your strategy is very effective for getting known by other bloggers, I don't know how to reciprocate or carry on a discussion (outside of that thread) with people that only leave an e-mail address. My 2 cents :)