Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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October 22, 2009

Building a Career: Combining a Personal Blog and a Company Job

charles wrote this at 9:34 am

When we are talking about building your own career, there is nothing more personal to you than your own blog.  When you are working for a company, there are many different kinds of situations which may cause you to leave or to stay temporarily.  But as you are building your career in the “real world”, you can start picking up your working knowledge and build them into useful information around your own blog in the “virtual world”.

Start building a career around your own blog today!

4 Do’s and 4 Don’ts in your blog while working on your job

Do’s

  1. Ponder about what you have learned today.  Start taking down notes, and build useful information that people will love to read about.
  2. Be an expert in your own topic.  This is your time when you can show off what you have learned.  Even though you may make mistakes at your own job, this is the time when you can learn from your mistakes and blog them.
  3. Start building your community and help people to build theirs by contributing your efforts.  Help others when you are approached if it doesn’t take you much in your time and money.  Be real and treat this like a hobby.
  4. It’s good to leverage on useful software and other people’s services.  You have a job, so start investing time and money in yourself to build a good portfolio!

Don’ts

  1. Don’t be influenced too much by all the hype about making money online. It can cause you to have information-overload syndrome  Good to listen, but just carry on building your blog.
  2. Don’t be fake.  If you are just not that kind of person, don’t do it!  If you are not the kind who will want to excel in your job, you probably won’t create a great blog anyway.  Very soon, your blog may just fade away.
  3. Don’t expect immediate results.  Blogging is just for building personal brand awareness.  If people like what you are blogging about, you will get your audience for sure.  It may take a while for the traffic to be aware of you.  Hence, start blogging if you have the patience to build it one post at a time.

Linking social media back to your blog

There are tons of networking opportunities in the social media through the exposure of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Social media brings the world even closer now that we are able to communicate and do business together in two different worlds of ours.

As you are communicating more and more in the social media, people will tend to find your blog if they have connected with you socially via an exchange of messages.  The blog can offer assurance to visitors about your worth in that industry you are in.  

Today, there are a lot of attractive blogging themes that we can leverage on, both free and paid versions.  All we need to do, is to populate our social media profile in our own blog accordingly, and to start blogging!

What may happen when you continue to do this?

  1. You may be able to make some money out of it through the huge audience that you may have created.  There are more and more people who seem to be able to work full time on their blogs just because of what they have shared.
  2. Or, you have actually done yourself a very big favor in your career path because this may lead you into a job opportunity or even a business opportunity!
  3. Or if you have gotten far enough in your blog and your industry, there are tons of businesses out there who are looking for bloggers who are either influential in their blogs, or are experienced in the social media.

Is this for real?

Seriously speaking, it is not easy.  The whole journey can be really tough and unexpected.  As for myself, I am actually perform a full time job e-marketing while I am blogging about what I have learned from my job experience.  In fact, I got my job because I used my blog as my resume!

My job is helping me to learn a lot more about the Internet, making my exposure even far greater than I have thought I would achieve on my own.  And with that experience, I actually “document” them down in a meaningful way in my blogs, and allowing my visitors to enjoy what I have learned so far.

Even if I am not going to be able to make a full time job out of blogging, I still get to know more and more fantastic people (such as Liz Strauss here!) through my online journey.  I really thank God for that.

The whole blogging experience is really a fruitful one for me, and I will continue and do even more than what I am doing today!

My question to all of you: What career values or opportunities have your blog brought you today?  Do share with us, I will love to hear about it  too!

This post was written by Charles. He has been an Internet reviewer since June 2007.  He pours his passion for Internet marketing and Internet branding into his Twitter account actively at @charleslau.

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5 Comments to “Building a Career: Combining a Personal Blog and a Company Job”

  1. October 22nd, 2009 at 10:05 am
    Ben said

    LOl. Don’t worry, Charles I won’t tell Liz you said “Real World”. Great write up, thank you.

  2. October 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
    Shauna said

    I really like #3 on both the Do’s & Don’ts. These things take TIME!

    I read somewhere that you should only get into blogging if you are willing to blog at 3am in your PJ’s. I agree with that because if you are willing to do it at 3am for free, building your blog won’t be a chore but something you look forward to. You’ll look forward to it even when your traffic drops for some crazy ANNOYING reason and you receive ANOTHER insane email because someone thinks you let your dogs nails get too long (???).

    If you can’t NOT write, you can get through all that stuff no sweat and continue to build your space.

    Thanks for the article!

  3. October 22nd, 2009 at 9:34 pm
    Holly said

    I think you have a lot of great tips here–I am definitely forwarding this to a couple friends. Thanks.

  4. October 23rd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    I heard that, Ben!
    I’m still laughing about it too!

  5. October 27th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
    Ms. Freeman said

    I am one of those working a job while attempting to build a strong online presence of my own. Great tips in this post. :)

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