Over the last year as I’ve enthusiastically evangelized blogging to build your personal brand, I’ve had a number of you say that it’s too hard, too much work, too much of a commitment, etc. It doesn’t help that you might be holding my blog as a goal or standard, which is not fair, because I blog as part of my business, and I know that many of you won’t have the time or purpose that I have. I don’t think I’m anything amazing, but please don’t consider my blog to be the example for what you should be doing.
Instead of telling you to blog for your personal brand, how about if I share three other ideas that can have a significant impact on your personal brand?
In today’s world, with so many communication barriers removed, we can all take more control about spreading various messages, and the messages that we choose to spread will have an impact on how others come to know us… the first tactic is to…
Write Articles
This is the easiest, quickest tactic to employ. You don’t need to commit to anything long-term, and can literally put out a great article in just a few hours (depending on how well you write). If you have any expertise in your field consider sending the article to one of your trade magazines (every magazine that I’ve seen has a call for articles, and there are e-mail addresses in the magazine that you can ask for more information).
If you don’t feel that you have what it takes to write an article for the trade magazine, well, I disagree. I’m sure you can figure something out – if it’s not technical or topical, it could be an article on trends, which I understand is very popular. If nothing else, you can write about a career management issue (if you are reading this blog I’m guessing you have your own list of 10 things that people should do for their job search, career management, network management, personal branding, etc.
There are article submission sites that will shoot your article out to various publications. I have only used The Phantom Writers, but Mike Schaffner recently sent me a link to Ezine Articles…. I’m sure there are dozens of these types of services. Some are free, some you pay for. But just getting your article published once makes you a published author. Cool, eh?
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Tomorrow I’ll talk about another tactic, and wrap it up on Monday.
Have you ever written an article? Would you consider it?
Update: Part II is here, Part III is here 🙂
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Yes, I have written an article for a newspaper and I am published. I did it as a challenge when I went to college. The instructor said that if we got an article published before the end of the semester, we did not have to take the final exam. I took the challenge and I was the only one who had an article published in the Salt Lake Tribune before the end of the semester. I wrote an editorial concerning Michael Faye, I believe that is his name. He is the young man who was convicted and caned in Singapore. I had strong feelings about it so I wrote about it and it was published in the Sunday paper back in 1994.
I believe there is tremendous freedom when you write what you are passionate about. Whether people agree with you or not, and not everyone will agree, just taking the time to say something may spark tremendous creativity, change, and synergy in others.
Darlene, that’s cool! I find it interesting how professors put a lot of weight in having something published… if you think about it, that’s the world they live in! Being a published realtor might not get you that next promotion, but being a published professor is critical for their career management. I think there is, however, a great opportunity for the average person to jump in and contribute to thought leadership… and that’s what this is all about.
Writing articles is great, but I think even stronger is to have a regular column, even if its for an online publication. Just like “author”, there’s a lot of cred in being able to say “columnist”. I know that for my coauthor and me, the value of being able to say “FastCompany.com columnist” has far exceeded the few actual visitor referrals generated. A lot of major publications have now opened up more regular columns for their online editions — Entrepreneur, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, etc.
Jason,
After the recent positive events (you know about it… thanks again for your advice) that happened to me, writing an article, could be something that I could think of as a sort of “payback” for the people I know: thanks to Linkedin, MLPF and Jibber Jobber!!!, I can realize the importance of many underlying issues regarding not only a more careful job search but an equally careful career management.
I can tell you that there aren’t appropriate sources of information for the Latin American job seeker (particularly the Mexican job seeker); as you know, a new professional time is here for me so, even though this is an obvious priority, I wonder if you could offer me some additional advice as to how to handle the process of writing an article for the Mexican job seeker and let them know (among other tools) about Jibber Jobber???
Best regards.
Mario, congrats on your new gig! Do a great job and don’t neglect your career management 🙂
You can probably sift through my blog, or some of your other sources of excellent information, to find stuff that is totally applicable to your audience. Try to keep it simple and basic, but still more than the average cliche advice. Put in your own personal experiences/stories to make it more meaningful.
Choose to focus on topics, perhaps networking, social networking, relationships, job search tactics, having target companies, or personal branding. Or, do one article for each of those. Keep them rather small (500 – 800 words) and consider using bullets.
Reach out to the popular Latin American or Mexican job boards and shoot them your article. Perhaps they’ll reprint them for you. Or, shoot them to some magazines or newspapers… people are always looking for good content.
What’s your angle? Highly qualified and motivated job seeker doesn’t get job right away? That was me… I’m not sure how many people that relates with, but I think a lot of my readers have though “ugh, I don’t want to end up like that!”
The very interesting dynamic of your articles would be the cultural issues… something that I can’t really speak to. So something you write for Mexico might not be appropriate for the US. But you can certainly turn some heads and say things that others aren’t ready to say yet, talking about some of the cultural injustices that you face that might be unique to Latin America or Mexico.
Good luck and shoot me your articles!
I think getting an article published on someone elses site adds more credibility to the article and in turn the branding image you wish to portray.
Getting a blog HELPS….is it a necessity? Well, you have other alternatives considering all the social networks not to mention a basic one page static web site.