How Building Out Your Personal Brand Helps with the Job Hunt
Personal branding helps you with your job search by giving prospective employers the ability to get a sense of who you are as a person when they inevitably Google your name.
By now you probably know the basics of personal branding. A website is a must, LinkedIn and Twitter (used responsibly) are your friends, any other social media accounts that pertain to your industry are crucial to have and a blog will give you a platform to show your expertise.
Blogs are great for companies to use to keep their websites active, show off their expertise and offer valuable information to their visitors. And a lot of people have started and monetized successful blogs over the years and now even make a living from them.
However, the chances of you actually starting and maintaining a blog on your site are rather slim. People will throw themselves into a blog for a few weeks or months, but then they lose momentum and it starts to become a burden and then it stalls.
Instead of starting a blog on your site, try personal branding with these tools and services instead:
Guest Posting
Sites like AllBusiness.com, YoungUpstarts.com, TriplePundit.com and MarketingProfs.com are resource sites that actively seek out guest posters to share their expertise. These sites will also allow you a link back to your site (and possibly your social media profiles), so your site gets an SEO boost.
Contributing to these third-party sites will make you look more authoritative because unlike your own blog, which you publish, these sites have established themselves as places where experts contribute their insights. If your post is accepted, you are published alongside other knowledgeable people, which looks good for you.
The sites listed are generalized business sites, but you can also guest post on more niche sites if you want to display your knowledge in a specific industry or area. A lot of business blogs accept guest posts and they’ll give you a link back to your site in the bio section.
Becoming a Columnist
Once you’ve had several guest posts published, you can try to become a regularly contributing columnist on a site with a lot of authority. The aforementioned AllBusiness.com has an Experts section where people contribute on a consistent basis.
Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com also have columnists and you can really shoot for the moon and try to get onto the Forbes.com contributors’ network. While you will have to contribute a certain number of posts per month, it’s well worth the effort to have one of these sites show up at the top of the search rankings when employers look up your name.
Answering HARO Queries
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, HelpAReporter.com (HARO) is a site where reports, bloggers, podcasters and other media members procure sources for stories or posts they’re working on. Media members post queries about a given subject and people who want to act as sources can answer these queries.
For example, you might see a media member asking to talk with someone who has experience working with saliva drug testing kits. If you are such a person, you can respond to this query and your response might get featured on a website (usually with a link back to your site).
Not all the sites on HARO looking for comments are high authority, but major networks and news outlets also use it. If you send out responses regularly, you’ll likely get featured on a few sites per month.
Personal branding is about showing your interests, your values and your expertise to potential employers. By using guest posting, parlaying that into a column on a high-ranking site and supplementing it all with HARO query responses, you can fill out the first several pages of search results for your name with a comprehensive online presence. Now that’s personal branding.