The work world has evolved past beating the pavement with a handful of carefully crafted paper rsums. While old world press the flesh and kiss some babies type of personal marketing can be invaluable, employers are ever-increasingly looking toward the Internet to find prospective employees. And if you ain’t on the net these days, you ain’t anywhere.
Using Your Blog To Stand Out
Editor’s Note: More and more people are talking about the potential of web logs and their various uses. One of the more compelling ideas is for personal marketing/branding-building an online image that works as a career agent to highlight your skills and your expertise. Do you think adding a web log to your online portfolio is useful or a waste of precious time? Do you have a web log that you use for this purpose? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Building a career, if you’re smart about it, becomes a brick-by-brick process akin to building a business. The essentials of business successes rest squarely upon the shoulders of marketing, accessibility, and demand. So, if you haven’t placed your product well, then you end up at the end of the Internet, or worse, not in there at all.
My friends, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls (excuse me as I raise my top hat and twirl my cane), step right up and allow me, Jason Miller of Murdok, to fill you in on the hottest new trend in professional personal marketing, something so simple a child could do it, an underexploited tool known as the web log.
Here are the benefits of adding a blog to your professional online portfolio:
Personal branding: A professional web log becomes your personal brand-a recognizable, searchable (more importantly-findable), representative you don’t have to pay to say the right things about you. It’s awake 24/7, and is always available for comment.
Networking: CareerXroads reports that 61% of all external hires come through two channels-employee referrals and the Internet. Creating a web log allows access to the image that you build for yourself and makes it easier to project that image to the 1000 daily visitors (a midrange estimate) to your blog. That’s 1000 potential contacts.
Better than a web portfolio: A web portfolio is, essentially, an online rsum, professionally laid out with accomplishments and work history. But what makes blogs more powerful is that they are more likely to pop up on SERP’s. That is because of detailed and regularly updated content. A web portfolio seldom changes and is limited to a stagnant list of brownie points. Blogging takes its edge from the content available that can always link back to you portfolio. Blogging also sets you up as an expert in your field much better than a CV (curriculum vitae).
Searchability: Alluded to perhaps 30 seconds ago (stop looking at your watch), the ability to be “googled” is quite impressive to many people and is a coveted, industry commanding presence. Blogging helps to set up your search-worthiness. A recent poll by Harris Interactive stated that 23% of the net savvy google the names of potential business contacts.
This article was written by Jason L. Miller of Murdok (Google+Search”>Google me).
With the flood of applicants that come into a company via the web, employers are looking for various tactics to weed out the unqualified. This is especially true because of the so-called “employment spammers,” who apply to all jobs they see whether they are qualified or not.
But what the spammers are getting right (in a twisted, pathetic kind of way) is a simple concept of repetition. If your name continues to pop up in various circles-linked to from websites and other blogs, hitting the SERPs with varied consistency-then the name will begin to stick into people’s minds. Not only your name, but what you’re about.
The foundation of any good marketing campaign is name recognition and that most often comes from name repetition.
This article was written by Jason L. Miller of Murdok (Google+Search”>Google me, I’m really on there!).
And hence, the annoyingly repetitious vein running through my article. Just proving a point.
In conclusion, if you want a leg up over people competing with you in your field, try and be ahead of the curve, balancing on the cutting edge of personal marketing. While, the others are busy licking stamps and wearing out their shoes on downtown sidewalks, you may be sporting a new pair of shoes as you walk into your new office. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Check out this Sun Microsystems employee blog on 10 reasons blogging is good for your career.
