Job Search Experiment Episode 2: Your Blog
By John Heaney on March 2, 2010 at 8:00 am
Job Search Experiment, Uncategorized, Video
Our real-life, real-time job search experiment continues with Episode 2: Your Blog.
Yesterday we suggested to our job seeking executive, Tim Krenn, that he create his social media identities on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, that he take a headshot that could be used across all the social media platforms and that he think of a blog topic that he could write about.
Today we take a second step and discuss why the blog is so important and the specific steps to create a blog of your own.
For the uninitiated, a blog is a website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material including graphics or video that relate to a specific topic. For our purposes we’re talking about a professional blog. One that relates directly to your professional experience and expertise.
WHY BLOG?
There are a lot of reasons why a professional blog can serve as your single biggest resource in your job search.
1. Build your personal brand – you have the capacity to determine how you are perceived by others through the content you generate and publish on your personal blog. You can demonstrate your particular expertise, your insight, your ability to analyze industry trends and convey your unique professional skills in a way that a resume simply can’t. Post by post, you can demonstrate your thought processes and perspective and differentiate yourself from every other job seeker with a similar background.
2. Provide thought leadership –your blog can be used to express your personal expertise in your discipline, answer questions that are important to people in your industry (and prospective employers), provide useful resources and information and even showcase your past successes.
3. Become more human – increasingly blogs are being used as a way to bring a more accessible and personal voice to life. Blogs are always personal in that they’re written by an individual with a unique perspective, experience, humor and a distinctive voice, and your readers can gain a more thoughtful and intimate knowledge of who you are by reading your regular posts.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – done right, your blog posts will be indexed by all the major search engines so when a prospective employer Googles your name, your posts will appear in the results, reinforcing your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.
GETTING STARTED
There are a lot of blogging platforms out there that provide you with the tools to create your personal blog at prices ranging from free to about $100/year. You can research them all or you can take my advice and build your blog using Wordpress.
If you go to wordpress.org, you can reserve your blog name and start creating right away for free , or you can take the advice that we gave Tim Krenn and use a Wordpress hosting company like Bluehost (Google Wordpress hosting to get a list of companies providing this service) to get your own domain name and email account for about $80. Although you have to pay for this service, owning your own domain means that you can modify the look and feel of your blog in much greater detail and also provides you with your own branded email address.
From a branding perspective, you’ll be perceived as more professional if you have your own domain, and preferably one whose name conveys what you’re writing about. Tim selected the blog name BullGooseSales.com to write about power sales and networking and created an email address tim@bullgoosesales.com that would automatically forward to his Gmail account.
Now, the tough part – creating content on a regular basis that demonstrates your professional expertise and resonates with your target audience.
And how do you build an audience? Stay tuned, we’ll be getting to that.
