I just read a post by Darren Rouse of ProBlogger.com that may be the best article I've read in months.

It is called, "Temporary Blogs: Blogs as Stepping Stones," and Darren discusses how several bloggers he really enjoyed in the past, have discontinued their blogs.

At first, he regarded these examples as failures, but then learned these bloggers achieved exactly the goals they set out for themselves.

One blogger dropped her blog after getting a job, which was her purpose for blogging in the first place. She used her blog to showcase her expertise, raise her profile within her field and create lots of content that could demonstrate her knowledge.

Her blog also provided her with a platform to network within her field and meet people she might not have met otherwise.

Once she landed the job she wanted, the need (she felt) for her blog was over. As she explained to Darren:

I wanted to land a job, I was out of work, and the blog was never really going to be anything beyond an online résumé, a place for me to build my profile and build some credibility, and potentially meet some employers.

Another blogger Darren enjoyed reading stopped after he got his fledgling software company off the ground. He told Darren:

He reflected back to me that again, his blog was a means to another end—he was never going to be a professional blogger, that wasn’t his model; his model was to launch a software company, and he used his blog to do that.

This confirms what I've been thinking for some time. I firmly believe that for some fields, resumes will become obsolete and be replaced by blogs, video channels, podcasts or other forms of online portfolios.

Few job applicants fit neatly into a "job description." Few entrepreneurs begin with the credibility they need to attract clients and investors.

But a blog (or podcast, video channel, etc.) is much more than a portfolio of your work. It is also an excellent vehicle to enable you to network with others (especially people you may not be able to contact directly in the offline world). When people comment on your posts, subscribe to your RSS or tweet about your content, you are gathering a following.

And this kind of following is based on your knowledge and insights, not just on the cut of your suit or whether you golf at an influential country club. In fact, just the fact that you have a blog makes YOU influential within your field.

This is the kind of credibility no resume can give you.

But there is one point on which I would disagree with Darren's two friends. Even after you land your dream job or get your company launched, it is misguided to kill your blog.

Two reasons:

1. Your dream job may not last forever. The company may fail or downsize employees. Or your goals may change. At that point, you will need not only the platform your blog once gave you, but also the contacts and readers (and fans) you gathered as a result of your blogging efforts.
   
   What should you do then? Start blogging again? Possibly, but you will most likely have lost a lot of your network that came to you through your blog.
   
   
2. Your blog will most likely make you more valuable to your employer or help you attract more new clients for your company. The same knowledge and expertise that made you valuable to an employer or investor, will make you valuable to potential clients.
   
   Your blog can easily be refocused so that you will be a rainmaker within your field. It will position you (and by extension, your company) as a solver of problems within your niche.

Therefore my advice is to dance with the one that brung you, so to speak. If your blog was what opened the door of opportunity for you in the first place, you will probably want more opportunities to come through that same door.

Your blog is the ultimate personal branding vehicle. It is personal branding not based on flash and style, but on substance, knowledge and solutions to the problems clients need to have solved.

What are your thoughts? Have you achieved success or accomplished a goal as a result of blogging or creating content? Have you landed a job or attracted clients as a result? Let me know.
COPYRIGHT © 2010, Charles Brown

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1. First, understand that a blog is absolutely essential for 99% of us who want to build a personal brand. Unless you already have the kind of visability and celebrity that enables you to freely pesent your ideas to the world, a blog is the only platform that will allow you to create and present information to your target audience. And even if you already have noteriety, a blog is the only platform that you can have complete control over.
   
   
2. Build your entire personal brand so that your blog is the hub of all your online activities. Everything you do online should link back to your blog. This is the ultimate place you want to lead readers to gain exposure about you and what you have to offer prospective clients or employers. This means that when people find your blog, they will find you.
   
   
3. Identify your niche by asking yourself "What problems am I very good at soliving?" Your answers to this question will determine the brand you present to the world. Define yourself as a solution to certain problems.
   
   
4. The reason this is an effective way to define your brand is because no employer or client ever hires anyone because of what they do, or how much experience they have. Ultimately they only hire people because they have problems that must be solved.
   
   
5. What do you write about? Keep a notebook or voice recorder with you and make note of any ideas, solutions or tips you think of. Set a goal to come up with 5 of these ideas per day. If you do this for a few months, you will never run out of things to write about.
   
   
6. Get used to thinking of yourself as an expert. If you are a solution to the problems you defined earlier, and you have a notebook full of ideas, solutions and tips, you are most certainly an expert. Don't be shy about it.
   
   
7. Create a minimum of 3 to 4 posts per week. No one said personal branding will be a walk in the park. It will take some effort and a commitment to the project to get it done.
   
   
8. However, your posts need not be lengthy or difficult. You can post short, 2 to 3 minute videos of yourself (a Flip camcorder costs under $150, and you can often find them for much less) discussing your ideas. In fact, your entire blog can be a video blog and you need not ever write a single article.
   
   
9. Other easy blog posts can be list articles (like this one), Frequently Asked Questions, or you can simply post a link to an article you found on the web with 2 or 3 paragraphs of your own thoughts on the subject. Don’t make your posts difficult, just make sure you add new posts regularly and consistently.
   
   
10. Don't make coming up with new blog posts an onerous job. Think like the late Paul Harvey. He was more a "news aggregator" than a traditional journalist. He came into the newsroom early every morning and pulled stories from the newswire services (this was before the internet). Then he selected the stories to talk about on his broadcast and added his own brief commentaries to them.
    
    
11. Study your targeted audience. What information do they need? What problems do they want to solve? What pain do they want to get rid of? What goals do they want to accomplish? What changes do they want to make in their businesses or their lives? What changes are impacting them that they must adapt to (or even be made aware of)?
    
    
12. What do you write or talk about? Don’t just talk about what you do or what you sell. That is a sure way to turn off your audience. Instead, look at the previous point about what your audience wants and needs. Draw from those questions for your material. Put the focus on your target audience, not yourself.
    
    
13. Don't worry that you are giving too much of your knowledge away. You can never over-educate your audience. All that will happen when you share your ideas and information is that you gain more credibility in their eyes.
    
    
14. Make your blog a resource of useful and actionable information for your audience. Give readers a reason to bookmark your site and keep coming back again and again.
    
    
15. In keeping with the previous point, create a recommended list of quality resources. This goes way beyond a simple blogroll. Single out specific articles and videos created by others that you think would be useful to your audience.
    
    
16. Have you noticed that I keep referring to your audience? This is deliberate. Stop thinking of them as prospects, customers, clients or potential employers. Think of them as consumers of the content you produce. And get used to thinking of yourself as a publisher.
    
    
17. Once you have a new article of video posted to your blog, tweet about it. Use Twitter to help people find your blog and drive traffic to your individual posts. With Twitter, you blog need not languish in obscurity. You can get readers in a matter of weeks rather than months and years.
    
    
18. When you send out a tweet, make it simple. A good personal branding tweet will consist of two things: a headline to offer a benefit and grab attention, and a link pointing to your blog post.
    
    
19. Use a “URL shortner” like bit.ly or tweetburner.com when you tweet that allows you to track how many people actually clicked on your link and visited your blog post.
    
    
20. With Twitter, there is no reason your older posts should ever stop working for you. If these older posts are still relevant, recycle them with tweets driving more traffic to them. If you took the time to write them in the first place, never let them lose their usefulness for you.
    
    
21. Always have an opt-in form prominently displayed on your blog to capture your readers’ email addresses. The main purpose of your site is to build an opt-in email list. One-time visitors do you absolutely no good. But with an opt-in list, you can induce them to be regular readers.
    
    
22. Entice readers to opt into your list by offering a newsletter or “Tip of the Week.” For example, financial planners and accountants can offer a “Money Tip of the Week.” Other professionals can offer a “Safety Tip of the Week” or “Wellness Tip of the Week.” You can also offer a free ebook or other digital product in order to get subscribers.
    
    
23. Once you have a list, keep them in the loop. Send them an email at least once a week and make your newsletter informative and useful.
    
    
24. Use your blog as a platform for networking. You can take the strategy of “informational interviewing” to a new level by asking experts if you can interview them for your blog. Although informational interviewing is typically taught to job seekers, you need not be looking for a job to use this approach. It not only gains you new contacts, it elevates you as a peer in their eyes. Plus, it also gains you access to that person’s audience and followers as well.
    
    
25. Use great headlines for each blog post. Here are some great resources by Brain Clark's Copyblogger.com: How to Write Magnetic Headlines.
    
    
26. Use great opening sentences for your posts as well. Another great post from Copyblogger is 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang.
    
    
27. Provide links to the other places you hang out on the web: Your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page, your Twitter username, your Google Profile, etc. Become interconnected on the web.
    
    
28. Don’t regard other bloggers in your field as competitors. When you find a great article on someone else’s blog, praise it on your own and link to it. You will quickly find that bloggers are a generous and supportive crowd if you treat them with respect.
    
    
29. Look for ways to meet these other bloggers in the offline world. Attend events or organize one of your own. If nothing else, create a free teleseminar in which you can have an exchange of ideas for both of your audiences to listen in on.
    
    
30. Leverage your blog as a way to get speaking engagements to various offline groups and organizations.
    
    
31. Comment on other blogs with links back to your own. Not only is this a great way to gain new readers, it is also another way to network with that other blogger. Sometimes you will write your own post based upon a post you found on another blog. When you do, trackback to that blog and build a conversation on the topic.
    
    
32. When you disagree with another blogger, do so without becoming disagreeable. Be polite, but make your own point. Establish your own, unique point of view.
    
    
33. Find material to write about by subscribing to the RSS feeds of other blogs, Digg.com, YouTube, Delicious.com, or alltop.com, to name a few.
    
    
34. Also, set up Google Alerts feeds to have new material emailed to you on your topic each day. Once you set up a Google Alert for your keyword, Google will notify you when a new item appears on the web under that search term.
    
    
35. Put your blog and Twitter URLs on your business cards and resume.
    
    
36. Use a service like blog2print or to compile some of your best blog posts into a hard copy booklet. Send this out with your resume, letters asking for speaking engagements or consulting proposals.
    
    
37. Make sure your Twitter and Facebook personal brands are consistent with the one you are building on your blog. Tweet about the same kind of information. Update on Facebook with the same audience wants and needs you address on your blog. I'm not one who says you cannot have family photos on the same Facebook page you do business on (people like to see who you are before they do business with you), but keep these things in the background, in good taste and make sure they do not detract from your personal branding efforts.
    
    
38. Even if you have never aspired to writing a book, you may find that your blog is writing a book for you. Just write your 3 to 4 new posts every week and before long you may have a publishable book on your hands. In addition, you blog will be creating a platform or readership for your book before you ever get it written.
    

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I've had several people ask me about the services I offer and thought it was about time for me to post a self-serving plug for myself. Hopefully, however, you will still find it oriented toward you, the reader of this blog, and how I might be able to help your business grow.

Sometime back, I was introduced to speak for a business group as "An expert on how to become an expert." I liked that intro quite a bit and have since adopted it as my "elevator pitch" or tag line.

I specialize in helping professionals and professional services organizations market themselves with social media. As a former lawyer myself, I know how difficult it is to market or "brand" oneself.

To this end, I offer several services:

• One-on-one coaching sessions by telephone and email on how to market yourself better by becoming an expert in your field.
  
• One-on-one coaching for professionals who are seeking to make a career change and want to use social media marketing to gain an edge in the job market and become known as an expert.
  
• Training sessions for professional services firms or association groups.
  
• Professional "ghost" blogging services for lawyers and law firms. (This means that if you do not have the time to write your own blog, you can hire me to do it for you).
  
• Speaking engagements and workshops for groups whose members would benefit from becoming recognized authorities in their fields.
  
• Reviews of your current marketing efforts. This means I will analyze your advertising, websites and other marketing materials and give you review with suggested ideas to improve what you are already doing.
  
• Consultation on improving your Google and other search engine rankings and how to get more traffic to your website.
  
• Consultation on how your firm can become a "thought leader" in your industry.
  
• Consultation on how to use non-spam, permission-based email marketing to build your practice.
  

I hope you find this list helpful. I you would like to discuss how I might help you further, please feel free to call me at 817-501-6892 or by email at chbrown/at/webmarketing-coach/dot/com.

If you like this article, follow me on Twitter.
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Since posting my earlier article today, A Social Media Strategy For Job Seekers - Part One, I had a couple of really interesting articles forwarded to me about using social media to find jobs. So, at the risk of seeming prolific, I thought I would post these links, plus a couple of others, for your consideration:

1. First,Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.com, sent me this article by Kevin Smith called, How I Got My Job Through Twitter. It shows how he made an important contact through Twitter and even got this contact to go to bat for him when his resume got lost.

2. The second article was sent to me by my good friend, Bill Hurlbut. It is called, "Unemployed (or Preparing to Be)? These Sites Could Be Your Best Friends." This article includes a number of financial survival sites that may be useful to anyone on shaky job grounds.

3. I can't give proper credit to the third article because I don't remember who sent it to me. But it is "7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media," by Dan Schawbel.

4. The fourth article is one I found on my own (he pats his own back ever so humbly). Since Facebook is, or should be, a core tool in using social media to find a job, I thought this was an essential. It is called, "Basic Facebook Strategy | 5 simple steps."

5. Fifth, since Twitter is another essential tool for any social networking campaign, I thought "Twitter - The Second Most Important Social Network" should also be included. I would, however, forego the tempting offer to purchase TweetLater Pro. The free version will suit you just fine.

6. Sixth, another vital Twitter resource is Twitter Tips. This is practically an encyclopedia of Twitter tutorials, tools and apps.

7. Seventh, no online job search campaign would be complete without mentioning LinkedIn. Check out this helpful LinkedIn Tutorial to help you get the most out of using this vital tool.

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I don't have to tell anyone what a tough job market we have out there. It seems that everyone I know is either out of work or is worried about losing their job. The trouble is that once a person is out on the streets, the competition for every single position is brutal.

How do you stand out in the crowd? How can you show a potential employer that you, among the hundreds of other applicants, are the one who should get the nod?

Several years ago, I taught a job search workshop for executives and mid-level managers in Atlanta. This was a really talented, credentialed group of very scared people.

This was around the time of the dot.com bubble burst around 2001 to 2002. Many of the people I taught had been six figure income earners with mortgages that matched their former incomes. They had remarkable skills and experience, but the job market was very tight (not nearly what it is now, but it was still very tight).

Step One: What Problems Are You Very Good At Solving?

One of the first things I tried to get them to do was define themselves as solutions to certain problems.

Anyone who has ever gotten a job has done so because someone saw this person as a solution to a problem or a group of related problems. Jobs are not filled to pad the employee rolls, they are filled to solve problems (I know I am being repititious here, but I want to get this point across).

One of the exercises I had my classes do was to write out a list of sentences that began with "I am very good at solving __________ ."

The first page or two of these sentences tended to be specific to their past jobs or companies. Stuff like, "Getting the XYZ report completed and distributed to regional vice presidents on time."

But after a bit, the sentences tended to open up a bit and became solutions to more common problems that other employers might be experiencing such as, "I am very good at finding the latest demographic data on b2b buying patterns." Or something like that.

The point is to learn to think of yourself as a solution. Think of the kinds of problems you are very good at solving and you are on your way.

Step Two: Start a Blog About That Problem

Now that you are thinking of yourself as a solution to a specific problem, start a blog about that problem (or set of related problems). In past posts I have written about ways to blog without having to write a lot of original content. Some of the very best bloggers are more like "news aggragators" than they are original content providers. Read other blogs, search the internet, post links to great content you find all over the web.

The goal here is not necessarily to impress an employer that you are a great writer (if you can write all the better), but to make your site a resource for helpful, useful information on solving these problems.

As you can see, this approach is designed to make yourself stand out among the crowd of job seekers who are competing for the few positions still available.

Note: I hope you also notice that these same tactics can work for freelancers or professionals who want to become known as authorities in their fields.

In Part Two of this series, we will talk about how to use your blog as a spring board to get noticed by prospective employers.

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This week I will be consulting with two friends who are being impacted by the economic upheaval. In both cases, I will probably recommend that they start developing a personal brand online.

The first person is my brother who was downsized after working nearly two decades for a major corporation. He has a very good resume, great references and excellent work experience.

The other person is a self-employed freelancer who wants to get more traffic to her website and convert more of those visitors into clients.

Both are finding that the old rules of marketing oneself, either in the form of a job search or marketing one’s services, have changed dramatically. Yet even though the goals of both are different, both efforts can be viewed through the lens of establishing a personal brand.

Adam Singer, in an excellent article called The Rise of Personal Branding, poses the question of who would you rather hire?

• Person A, who has an excellent resume, work history and references, or
  
• Person B, who has all of the above, plus a blog that has gathered an audience of readers because she has produced a body of work on her field. When you Google this person, it is easy to find links and references that demonstrate this person has established a noteworthy online presence.

The answer, of course, is obvious. Person B is a thought leader and has established a personal brand within his or her industry. This person has demonstrated an interest in her industry that does not cease when she goes home for the day.

One of the coaching services I offer is to work with professionals who want to establish themselves as experts in their fields. In every case, we begin with a blog and why creating a blog is an essential tool for anyone wanting to create a personal brand identity.

But also in every case, I hear the same resistance that my client either hates to write, does not have time to write or doesn’t know what to write about.

To which I reply, “horse feathers” (or something along those lines).

You can create a very useful blog simply by becoming a “news gatherer.”

Think of Paul Harvey, who passed away this weekend. He was not a journalist in the classic sense of the word, he was a news gatherer who sought out news items and brought them to the attention of his audience.

You can do the same thing. Simply find useful information on the web that would be of interest to your target audience, and post links to that material on your blog. Then you can write a brief, one-paragraph comment on the material you are linking to just to add your own thoughts and personality to the piece.

And that’s it.

Yes, you can also write at length on certain topics if you feel like it. In fact I encourage you to do so because your whole purpose in blogging is to establish yourself as an expert.

Where do you find material to blog about and link to? Here are a few sources to try:

• Google, of course. Look up your topic and you will no doubt find thousands of pages full of material.
  
• Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that covers most topics and provides you with many links to other sources.
  
• ezinearticles.com is an article bank that permits you to reprint thousands of articles as long as you give proper attribution to the author.
  
• Social bookmarking sites like Digg.com or Stumbleupon.com.
  
• Google Alerts. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, with Google Alerts, you can do a one-time search for a topic and anytime new results appear on the web, they are sent to you by email. This is a very good way to stay on top of breaking news that may impact your field and keep you current on the latest developments. Of course the purpose here is to keep your readers up to date on these developments by blogging about them.

So don’t be intimidated by the thought of creating a blog. If your mission is to establish a personal brand, either to get a job or to attract business, nothing could help you more than to become a recognized authority in your field.

I firmly believe that a blog is the engine that runs any modern personal branding effort. It is a place to showcase your knowledge, your ability to solve problems and to transcend the normal, “hey look at me” approach to job searching or marketing.

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NOT USING NON-SPAM EMAIL MARKETING FOR YOUR BUSINESS YET? Learn why email marketing is the easiest, most effective and most affordable way to get new clients. Download my free ebook and receive tips, ideas and case studies to help you get more new customers at http://www.trafficwave.net/lcp/chbrown/emailmarketing/6604.
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