Recruiters search the web to locate potential hires and uncover candidates for positions they need to fill. Blogging allows you to create demand for you personal brand in the job market. A successful blog can lead to job offers and other opportunities. It is much better to have potential employers pursuing you.

Career Passion
In your ideal job you will get hired and paid to do what you are passionate about. Successful blogging requires this same passion and conviction. Your blog should focus on your chosen career, on topics that you believe in and communicate your passion to your network.

Using a blog to develop your personal brand is important for all types of professional positions. This can include management, marketing, advertising, journalism or any career where written communication skills are valued. This allows employers to see a sample of what you are about. After all, from the employer’s point of view, their ideal candidate is passionate about what they do.

Career Blogging Plan
Creating a plan before you begin blogging allows you to focus on achieving the results that you want. Each posting in your blog should reflect your plan. As you refine what you want to do, don’t be afraid to change your plan.

1. Choose a career. This is based on your interests, gifts, skills and experience. This should be something that will stimulate you for many years.
2. Choose a topic. Choose closely related topics to your chosen career that greatly interest you and will interest potential employers.
3. Become an expert: An interesting thing happens when you focus on a topic. You read everything you can find; you listen and research more deeply. If you weren’t an expert before, you do become an expert. We call this the blogging mindset.
4. Targeting: Target a network of people who value what you do. This should include potential employers. Targeting your blog audience gets much better results.

Branding is important in establishing your reputation. This applies to a person, an organization or a product. Personal branding is especially important in today’s marketplace for a service provider or a job seeker. Your personal brand is how others compare you with your peers. Those that don’t choose to differentiate themselves are turning into commodities.

In service companies, it is often the person behind the product or service that is its greatest asset. Personal branding builds up your unique value proposition and allows you to stand out from everyone else. Creating your own “personal brand” helps drive yourself to the next level. In a competitive marketplace, blogging is frequently the simplest, fastest and easiest way to spread the word.

In building up your personal brand, these are important elements in forming your campaign.

1. Offer Value: Your brand needs to offer something of value. Your brand is only valuable if you’re different in a way that’s valuable to people.
2. Innovate: In a world full of people doing similar things, the person with new ideas and new ways of doing will draw the interest and attention of the market.
3. Be a Leader: You will have to build your reputation as the “expert.” You have to get the attention of your niche. Show your knowledge without being arrogant.
4. Build Trust: People do business with people that they know and trust. Be authentic and talk about your successes and your failures. Be helpful.
5. Be Personal: Blogs lend themselves to an informal conversational style that people like to read. Inject humor and personality into your writing.
6. Relationships: Build rapport with your readers and with other bloggers. Visit and enter blog conversations on other blogs that deal with your subject.
7. Consistency: Be consistent in your values, your topics and your approach to situations. Developing and changing opinions and ideas as you grow is fine.

Web 2.0 technologies of today are about quickly connecting, sharing, learning and communicating. These technologies are perfect for job searching and are a faster than traditional job search methods. More and more recruiters from larger companies are using social media as a tool to connect to potential new hires.

Resume Blog
Using your blog as your resume allows you to put yourself out the widest group of potential employers. Resume blogs are much more in depth than traditional resumes. Post stories about your major accomplishments, projects, your education and any topics you are passionate about. Be real. Be fresh. Communicate in both directions by enabling and encouraging comments.

YouTube
Posting your video resume on YouTube can get you noticed. You are able to stand out from your competition. Use your keyword phrases in the video title and description to help your video resume be found in the search engines. You can also embed your videos into your resume blog to add a voice and face to your resume.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a powerful networking tool. Post your profile and connect to as many people as possible with LinkedIn. They have tools that will show you which job openings have people from your network already working at that company. Inside introductions are a powerful advantage in getting your resume to the right person. LinkedIn also puts your information out for LinkedIn members and Google searches. Many thousands of job recruiters are part of the LinkedIn network..

Facebook and MySpace
Facebook and MySpace allow you to post a profile and place regular updates about yourself. It is becoming common for corporate recruiters to log into social networking sites to check out the profile of a potential hire. They are using these sites as another way to check references. Clean-up your profile and remove inappropriate content that you would not want an employer to see.

These job search tools are available for you to use. There is either no cost or low cost to apply these Web 2.0 tools to your job search.

Blog marketing not only works to build up your business, it works to develop your own personal online reputation. This can be used to develop your personal brand or as a strategy to find a new job. Use blogs to voice your opinion on topics that you are passionate about and establish a network of people that are interested in your ideas.

Blogging can develop and build your career in two ways. The first is by developing your own personal brand as an expert. This is effective if you strategically select topics that align with your career plans. As you develop your own audience, some of your readers will seek you out to do work for them.

The second approach is to do resume blogging. This involves using your blog as an in depth resume that search engines such as Google will index making it easy for the widest group of potential employers to find you. A resume blog is much more in depth than the typical 1-2 page paper resume. It can include postings on career stories, major accomplishments and projects.

In either approach, the focus of your blogging is on you, the writer what you have done or what you can do.

One note of caution, as you blog about current and past jobs, it is important to stay away from discussing any confidential or proprietary. This usually includes financials, customers, fellow employees and proprietary technology. Disclosing confidential information will only hurt your career opportunities. Not only could you attract the ire of your employer, but potential employers will not want to risk hiring you.

Marketing your self with blogs creates new opportunities with a wider audience than traditional networking

Combining business blog marketing and traditional website marketing is especially effective when you start up a new business. Blogging is one of the fastest ways of announcing your business and spreading the word quickly about what you do.

You can quickly gain a following on the Internet. There are an ever increasing number of people who regularly read blogs as their source of news and information.

New companies should look at launching a blog and a website for maximum exposure. A combined approach using a website and a blog is usually the fastest approach. You will that you will gain a much broader reach by using both. The website and blog have different functions.

The website is the advertising and marketing piece. The new website should be the marketing focus that touts the advantages, benefits and conveniences of using your business. The new website should bring in traffic with both pay-per-click advertising and organic SEO.

The blog should provide interesting reading and resource materials to your targeted customers. The blog will much more quickly gain a readership following if the content plan is good and your blog should allow interested readers to find navigation links to your website. This will provide direct referral traffic and valuable link popularity for your website.

The website and blog will reach different audiences, have different focuses, have different conversational tones, but still strive to reach the same targeted customer. The blog and website reinforce each other and magnify the results.

Locating the right domain name is very important for the branding of a business and the business website. These are my favorite sites for researching and finding domain name. This is the process that I will go through in selecting a domain name for a business website.

Keywords
My first step is to identify keyword phrases that are getting good traffic. There are a number of good research tools that are free.

1. Google Adwords Free tool based on PPC data
2. WordTracker Free tool based on search data

Locate Domain Names
I have two research tools that I will use to search using the keywords I want.

1. DomainsBot: Reasearch based on keyword phrases. Advanced features let you select based on many parameters including maximum number of characters.
2. NameBoy: Generates possible names based on Keywords and displays results in an easy to scan table showing results for all possible TLD’s (COM, NET, ORG, etc.)

Other Domain Research Tools

1. Buy and Sell Domains: Sedo is the leading marketplace for buying and selling used domain names
2. Expiring Domains: DropScout shows domains expiring (Pending Delete) in the next 6 days. Search by age, PR or number of characters.
3. Whois Search: Very complete set of whois info as well as screenshot, history and SEO information
4. Free Domain Appraisal: This is a free service and the results are always on the high side. This is still a good quick estimate.
5. Internet Archive: What websites have been on a domain name in the past.

When it comes to buying the domain, I recommend that you come you come to one of my websites DougWilliams.com or Dwassoc.com

RSS is at the heart of what makes a blog work. Remember a blog is a special website that allows easy web publishing with a content management system (CMS) and notifies the web each time a new article is posted (RSS). So how does this work?

Once you create a new article or posting, you are able to make this public by publishing what you wrote. When you publish, three things happen.

1. What you wrote immediately becomes visible to your blog visitors.
2. Your blog creates an RSS-XML file that is easily read by search engines and blog engines. These XML files are really a simple text file called a feed.
3. A ping is sent out to notify that you have something new on your blog. This invites blog engines and subscribers to look at your new content.

The blog ping that is sent out is a small XML file that contains the blog title, a brief description and a link to where the new content can be found. This ping is received by the major services which notifies search engines you now have new content.

The blog and search engines will either display the XML feeds they received or will send their own spiders back to retrieve more information. The results are that what you write is being indexed and available on the Internet within minutes of being published. This is a similar process to the way news stories are released to the Internet.

Subscribers to your feed can either be notified by ping or their feed readers will regularly go back and check your RSS-XML files to see if anything new has been posted. When the reader finds updates, it makes them available to the recipient. The readers usually display the information from the XML files with a link to the content.

Traffic statistics are one of the best measurement systems available to the blogger. This gives almost immediate feedback to how each posting is being received by your readers. Almost any of the traffic statistics packages out there will give you the basic information you need to build your readership.

Traffic statistics measure if your blog titles are drawing in traffic, if your content is interesting and if the comments you are making on other blogs is referring traffic to your site. Don’t obsess over your site statistics but use them as a tool to find out what your visitors find interesting.

1. Overall Trend – Is there a steady increase in traffic coming to your blog. I watch the total number of visits, the number of unique visitors and the volume of visits each day. If you take your monthly totals and divide the total visits by the unique visitors, you will get the number of times the average visitor came back to your blog.
2. Most Popular – Which postings are attracting the most traffic? I will look at this two ways. I look at the daily traffic and see which days had a spike in traffic. I then look at which articles appeared that day and try and figure out what I said that was most interesting and I will try and do this again. I will also look which postings are listed as entry pages. These are usually the ones being found in searches.
3. Referral Traffic – Which sites are sending you visitors? Visit the site and investigate if it is a link from a website, a blog posting or perhaps a link in a comment that you have left. Commenting gets the attention of the bloggers that you focus on
4. Referring Search Engines – Which search engines are referring visitors to you? You are probably ranked well for one or more search terms on this engine. If it’s a keyword you want others to find through search engines, write a blog post with that keyword in the headline.
5. Keywords – Which keyword phrases are you being found for? Find the posting that is generating the traffic and see what you did? If this is a phrase you are targeting, see how you can do this again. It helps you to know how to optimize your blog for SEO even better and can give hints on what content to write more of.
6. Bounce Rate – Some Statistics packages such as Google Analytics show Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of people who leave your website without viewing any extra pages. Bounce rates under 50% are good, if it is greater than 75% then you need to make some changes.

Other things to watch include which postings are getting comments and what questions are being asked? These could make great future posts. Check Technorati inbound links - So that I can connect with or respond to someone who has just linked to my blog.

Write good, quality, interesting content, blog about the subject you’re most passionate about, post on a consistent schedule, invest in the blogging community by participating in other blogger’s posts.

There are many millions of blogs out there; many dealing with the same subject as yours. How do you get noticed with such competition? People make their choices based on differences. To make your blog marketing campaign a runaway success, you need to differentiate it from all the rest out there.

How do you get your blog to stand out from the crowd? Here are 5 ways to make your blog memorable.

1. Personality: Readers are attracted to blogs written with more personality. People respond well to strong personalities because they are more entertaining. Developing your own uniqueness and your own voice helps develop your following.
2. Passion: Passion is inspiring, captivating and draws people in. People listen when you speak strongly with conviction and confidence. After all, if you feel strongly then it must be true.
3. Headlines: A catchy headline will bring in a stream of new visitors. As people browse blog engines such as Technorati, they are scanning the headlines. Be different, be bold and be eye catching.
4. Openers: The first paragraph is the most important except for the headline. Grab their attention with the first few lines. This draws people in and if it is interesting, then they will continue reading. If it is dull, then you have lost them.
5. Depth: People read blogs for information. Don’t brush over the subject but write with detail and with examples. Depth does not mean lengthy, it is important to be concise in your writing. Link to your resources, this allows your readers to explore if they wish.

Daring to be different is important to success. Seth Godin suggests “Do the never.” Remember when toothpaste was only available in squeezable tubes and never any other way?

Identifying and connecting with your readership is vital to the success in blog marketing. Who are your best prospects? Focus on your target audience. This allows you to address their goals and interests. Writing about these subjects, from different angles and with captivating storylines will convert more followers.

Identifying Your Target
Who are you trying to reach? What niche market are you going after? Your blog audience tends to be different than your typical customer. Blog readers tend to be more knowledgeable, more technical and more up to date on the latest developments. They read multiple blogs to stay up to date. It is important to plan and write to attract only those readers.

What to write about?
What is it that your selected audience wants to read about? Choose a topic that your ideal prospect wants to read about.

If you were a seller of baby furniture and you want to reach first time parents, then you may want to write about naming a baby. This way you reach your targeted readers at about the same time they are buying baby furniture. Of course you would have links on your blog to your baby furniture website.

Conversational tone
Writing should be informal, honest and conversational. Blogs give your readers a glimpse of your personality. You should use terms, phrases and even colloquialisms that they will recognize. Your postings should build trust. Your objective is to connect with your readers so they will return and ultimately contact you when they need what you have to offer

No matter how intriguing your subject, how well written the posting, if you fail to reach your audience, you have missed your target.