How Blogging Helps Your Career #1 – Presence

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I blog.  You kind of noticed that because you’re reading one.  Or you could go to NerdCaliber, or to my own site.  I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s definitely helped my career.

Which of course is where I’m taking this all kind of meta and blogging about how blogging helped my career.  Which of course may also help my career.  We’re in deep, Inception-meme territory here, people.

So, when you ask is blogging for you and is it going to help your professional geek career, I wanted to share what it’s done for me – which is quite a bit.

First, blogging is a presence, a beacon that says “here I am, this is me.”

It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle in your career, because there’s so many people doing what you do.  it’s easy to be forgotten by recruiters because there’s a huge pile of resumes in front of them and their eyes are glazing over.  It’s easy to be looked over by a client or a boss or anyone else because you’re just not that distinct.

A good career, be it one inside a company, or your own business where you need to attract customers, is one founded on being visible.  People need to know you, people need to know who you are, people need to remember you.  Visibility and being memorable are just as important as anything else in your career, and in some ways (perhaps sadly) more important since no matter how great you are, it doesn’t help if people forget you two minutes after finding out about you.

A blog is one way to solve that.

Think of how memorable you are if you blog.  You may have a website you blog and at people will remember it for the URL, and the content, and perhaps the cute pictures of your Corgi dressed as Tyrion from Game of Thrones*.  You have, in short, become memorable by the act of establishing something, something people can recall and find again.

Even if you’re not up for your own blog, you can blog elsewhere to establish a presence, credibility, and to post those Corgi pictures**.   This helps you have most of the advantages of a blog, while sharing in camaraderie and/or helping out someone with their site.  You’re still there, visible, with a given location for people to visit.

There, visible, is a giant shout out “I am here, here are memorable things!”  Hopefully they’re good memorable things, but you are at least memorable and established.

For me, blogging has definitely had a benefit of making me more memorable.  People read my blog entries at various sites.  People remember me.  Recruiters comment on my recipe posts.  I am remembered.

So try blogging and announce yourself to the world.  Sure you may not be big or famous (who really will be), but you’ll shine a lot brighter than those who don’t.

Takeaways and To Dos:

  • If you’re not sure about blogging, give it a try at some other sites.
  • Your main personal site doesn’t have to be a blog, but be sure it links visible to places you do blog.
  • Decide when and how to share information on your blogging – it may not always appeal or help with your target audience.
  • Blogging has to be regular and relevant for people to pay attention.  I strongly recommend doing something you truly believe in.
  • It doesn’t have to be professional for you to be remembered, but again keep your overall self-image in mind.
  • If you want it to be a good establishment of your presence, a bright shining beacon, it has to be traceable back to you.  If you want to keep your blogging anonymous, then it won’t help.

Let me close with this: It’s a Corgi named Tyrion.  So close.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

* If you do this, PLEASE send me pictures.
** If someone had a website dedicated to fantasy costumes for Corgis, you’d go there, you know it.

Christmas With The Service Outage

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Remember Christmases when the outages of Netflix or Steam wouldn’t have been factors?  It was only a few years ago when it wouldn’t have been as noticed or even regarded.

Of course now we can add large-scale technical glitches to other holiday annoyances like non-working Christmas lights, traffic, closed businesses, and crowded airports.  I wonder how used we’ll get to them.

I imagine not very.  We expect instant service from our technology, even if we usually accept much less.  However I imagine Netflix and Valve know this and will work to correct things for next year.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

For Us, Easy Bake is Easy To Take

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Well, it’s happened.  Hasbro, after criticism, is going gender neutral on it’s Easy Bake Oven.  As a guy who likes to cook, let me say “bravo”, and may I suggest a line of gender-neutral kid’s cookbooks and cooking utensils.  No I’m serious, have you seen how kids are eating?

It appears there’s awareness of gender issues and toy sales, even if attempts are a bit offbeat.  Of course geeks like us know that there’s plenty of cases of gender-bent preferences.

  • Hasbro, of course, has My Little Pony, which makes the easy-bake over issue look like nothing.  If they released a Pinkie Pie Microwave, grown men would buy it.
  • There’s “The Transformers,” whose fandom taught me that if your last name is “Prime” there’s no small amount of women who, when younger, thought you were the sexiest thing on two legs or four wheels.  Peter Cullen, and that large cast of Rodimi, do you know what you did?
  • Huge amounts of anime targeted at men with casts of buff guys punching stuff and bonding attract huge female audiences because it’s buff guys punching stuff and bonding.  Yaoi is a kind of cultural alkaheist.

Nothing here really surprises us.  The issues of gender-target expectations being off doesn’t surprise us.

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