The employment market gets tougher and tougher as the years go by. This article is not to point out the reasons for this. Rather, it is designed to point out a viable way to get through unemployment’s universal challenge. Blogs have proved to be a medium to get employment for many in recent years.
What is a blog?
A blog is an online platform where you can showcase your writing, artwork, or curriculum vitae. A blog is a great medium for showing off your wealth of experience or knowledge on a particular niche. The best way to start your blogging journey is to guest-post or guest-contribute to the sites and blogs you’re reading! This is rarely easy when you start as you have never been published. Therefore, there is no online social proof to attest or your credibility. However, you have to be persistent. You can start by creating a few works of your own through thought leadership content on sites such as Quora or LinkedIn to showcase it to editors of popular blog sites that you’ll like to write for.
The spectacular thing about a blog is the ability to share it instantly with a wide audience or a targeted audience. It’s a place where you get all the attention.
Blogging and job opportunities
You might begin to wonder what job opportunities have got to do with owning a blog. This is it; you need as much attention as you can get if you are job-hunting. To this end, a blog sets you apart from the pack and puts you a few steps ahead of them. So, how do you go about starting a blog with the sole aim of getting job opportunities?
The first thing to do is deciding where to blog. Blogging is a wide concept, and you have to be very careful when picking a niche. It is usually ideal that you take a list of niches that have strong ties to your discipline or something you are passionate about, pick a few topics, and write your first set of posts, and monitor the feedbacks you would be getting. The result would give you a heads up on which of the niches would be perfect for you.
Once you have a blog up and running, all you need to do is put the link to it on your online resume. While many careers could be boosted via blogging, there are few careers that value bloggers and blogging as a whole. With them, your chances of getting a job are very high. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
- Writing
If you are a young student or recent graduate with a flair for writing, a career in online writing is just right for you. Several organizations are interested in vibrant individuals who frequently write, keep up to date with the media, and can produce original, creative content on the fly. Once you can put out good content via a blog related to their product or services, you stand a better chance of being offered gigs, even if it is on a freelancing basis.
- Marketing
Marketing has always been relevant. In recent decades, the concept of digital marketing has brought about a revolution in this field. More so, it is one of those fields where you can have a firm grip on how successful you would be, provided you are well equipped, and you present yourself well.
Think of your target audience when creating a marketing plan for your blog. You would want to connect to leaders in your designated field and others like you that are just passionate to learn and interact on topics you’ve written about. As part of your cost-effective marketing plan, consider drawing crowds from other social media or blog sites to yours.
One important element of marketing is to have a subscriber list. Push to acquire information such as where they work and their current job title. This gives you a deeper perspective of who your audience are and what sort of topics they could be interested in. You’ll need deeper interactions with them as you create more content for the future.
- Advertising
Whilst the purpose of blogging is to share knowledge with the world. The truth is that blogging does require time and it would be helpful if you can make some funds on the side for your effort. Although advertising careers and marketing careers go hand in hand, there is a subtle difference from a blogger’s perspective.
Advertising is strictly about attracting brands to sell products and services on a blog space (unlike marketing, which is somewhat all-encompassing). Under digital marketing, blog advertising is geared towards the kinds of landing pages that work best for a specific audience. You’ll also have to Identify where banner ads get the most clicks and many other crucial details. These are used in boosting sales for clients.
When equipped with a blog, you’ll be steps ahead of other candidates who have nothing other than combined projects in which they have participated.
Getting started with blogging for employment
Irrespective of the niche you choose for your blogging, there are defined steps to take if you want to blog to get more job opportunities.
- Choose and Host Your Blog
After considering the reasons for creating your blog, the next eventful step is to come up with a domain name and host, so that you can begin sharing your knowledge with the world. Bluehost and Hostinger are one of the most popular domain name providers and hosting sites in the world. They both have affordable plans for a newbie and offer a wide array of other services that could help you as you start your journey in blogging.
In addition to getting a name and hosting your blog, you’ll need a web platform that enables you to create your dream site. You may want to start with WordPress as it the most popular platform in the world for creating blogs or websites and one of the easiest to learn. It is also an open-source platform, which is free to download and use for commercial purposes.
- Post consistently
Creating the blog is the easy part. Content creation is the hard part. If you want to succeed at blogging, consistency is one of the most important elements if you want to be visible and have a following. It has been noted that frequently updated blogs with 2 or 3 new content weekly draw more attention than those creating less content. This requires that you draft a regular publishing schedule and stick to it. This is a function of discipline. To make it easy for you, choose a schedule, you can easily keep (even if it is as little as twice a week). One useful tool for bloggers in the advertising space is VEED, which offers a video trimmer and video converter feature. By using VEED to create engaging video content, you can showcase the effectiveness of your blog’s advertising potential to potential clients. This can make it easier to attract brands and help boost sales for them.
- Display your expertise
How do you get a job when you are not putting yourself out there enough? Your blog is a medium capable of marketing your strongest attributes to the right guys; therefore, do not hold back from posting about your successes in your chosen niche while ensuring top-notch communication and community engagement.
- Encourage interaction with the audience.
The best blogs are not a one-way media outlet. Rather, they are fed with content that sparks interesting conversations. Therefore, pose a question and invite your audience to contribute in the comment section after you must project yourself as a capable facilitator of meaningful discussion. This is a quality employer in most spheres looks out for. Therefore, it is a plus to your job-hunting agenda.
To gain a wider audience and a bigger chance of more job opportunities, you can involve other bloggers whose ideas align with yours. If you do this rightly, you’ll boost your chances of attracting experts in the field who may turn out to be potential employers. Also, you can invite contacts to provide guest posts. This is a potential win, both for you and the contributing writers. It gives them a platform to be more visible, and you also get to infuse added voices into your blog.
- Maintain professionalism
Remember that the major reason you are running a blog is to increase your chances of getting employed; therefore, your blog must always be a point of pride. So, always look at your blog and see if you would be comfortable showing it to a potential employer. If you are comfortable with the idea, then go ahead. If otherwise, it is recommended that you dedicate more time and resources to keep it professional.
Conclusion
You have seen clearly how you can boost your chances of getting a job using a blog. Therefore, what is stopping you from starting one now? It’s incredibly easy to start your online presence. You can easily build a following through free tools like Facebook and Twitter and still maintain a high professional level.
If you’re already blogging, that’s a good move, utilize all the tips mentioned so far, and you are sure to get the right results. Don’t forget to inspire discussion, and connect with like-minded individuals. Blogging can also land you a dream job. It has happened to many people, and you could be next. Therefore, start working at it now.
