career

How Blogging Helps Your Career #8 – The Soap Box

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(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

You have things to say.  You have ideas.  You have statements.

You want to get them out.  To broadcast them.

You want to know how to reach people and connect with them.

You want to get over your fear of doing it in the first place.

Come to think of it, on your job, chances are you wish you were better at shooting your mouth off effectively.

A blog is a great way to get better at this.

Blogging is a soap box you can stand on and shout from.

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How Blogging Helps Your Career #7 – The Laboratory

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(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

Blogging is a way to grow and expand who you are – certainly it’s a kind of obstacle course that’ll teach you to be a better researcher.

But beyond the learning experiences and the stretching and expanding it puts you through, blogging also gives you options.  Lots of options.  A blog is there for you to do anything with.

Want to try a new blogging platform or plugin? Fine.

Want to try a new writing style?  Post that sucker no matter what.

Different layouts?  Easy.

Different SEO?  Go for it.

Blogging is about writing and communicating, but it’s filled with options from software and extras to the sheer freedom of writing anything on the internet.

Blogging is a laboratory.

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How Blogging Helps Your Career #1 – Presence

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I blog.  You kind of noticed that because you’re reading one.  Or you could go to NerdCaliber, or to my own site.  I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s definitely helped my career.

Which of course is where I’m taking this all kind of meta and blogging about how blogging helped my career.  Which of course may also help my career.  We’re in deep, Inception-meme territory here, people.

So, when you ask is blogging for you and is it going to help your professional geek career, I wanted to share what it’s done for me – which is quite a bit.

First, blogging is a presence, a beacon that says “here I am, this is me.”

It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle in your career, because there’s so many people doing what you do.  it’s easy to be forgotten by recruiters because there’s a huge pile of resumes in front of them and their eyes are glazing over.  It’s easy to be looked over by a client or a boss or anyone else because you’re just not that distinct.

A good career, be it one inside a company, or your own business where you need to attract customers, is one founded on being visible.  People need to know you, people need to know who you are, people need to remember you.  Visibility and being memorable are just as important as anything else in your career, and in some ways (perhaps sadly) more important since no matter how great you are, it doesn’t help if people forget you two minutes after finding out about you.

A blog is one way to solve that.

Think of how memorable you are if you blog.  You may have a website you blog and at people will remember it for the URL, and the content, and perhaps the cute pictures of your Corgi dressed as Tyrion from Game of Thrones*.  You have, in short, become memorable by the act of establishing something, something people can recall and find again.

Even if you’re not up for your own blog, you can blog elsewhere to establish a presence, credibility, and to post those Corgi pictures**.   This helps you have most of the advantages of a blog, while sharing in camaraderie and/or helping out someone with their site.  You’re still there, visible, with a given location for people to visit.

There, visible, is a giant shout out “I am here, here are memorable things!”  Hopefully they’re good memorable things, but you are at least memorable and established.

For me, blogging has definitely had a benefit of making me more memorable.  People read my blog entries at various sites.  People remember me.  Recruiters comment on my recipe posts.  I am remembered.

So try blogging and announce yourself to the world.  Sure you may not be big or famous (who really will be), but you’ll shine a lot brighter than those who don’t.

Takeaways and To Dos:

  • If you’re not sure about blogging, give it a try at some other sites.
  • Your main personal site doesn’t have to be a blog, but be sure it links visible to places you do blog.
  • Decide when and how to share information on your blogging – it may not always appeal or help with your target audience.
  • Blogging has to be regular and relevant for people to pay attention.  I strongly recommend doing something you truly believe in.
  • It doesn’t have to be professional for you to be remembered, but again keep your overall self-image in mind.
  • If you want it to be a good establishment of your presence, a bright shining beacon, it has to be traceable back to you.  If you want to keep your blogging anonymous, then it won’t help.

Let me close with this: It’s a Corgi named Tyrion.  So close.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

* If you do this, PLEASE send me pictures.
** If someone had a website dedicated to fantasy costumes for Corgis, you’d go there, you know it.