I have been blogging for about a year and 3 months now. As I said earlier when you are passionate about something, learning about it is always an ongoing process where you try to look for examples that you can rely on, look for insights from others, eager to learn their success stories and look for mentoring lessons.
This past week I met a few key HR personalities in person. People that I have been following on social media for a long time. And one of them was Jessica Miller-Merrell, the founder of Blogging4Jobs. For those who love to read HR blogs and are interested to keep themselves updated on the latest trends in Human Resources, Recruiting & Social media, Blogging4jobs can be your resource. Recently, Blogging4Jobs was named ‘a top career site for job seekers’ by Forbes Magazine. And the site is well known for the solid content that is cutting edge.
When I knew Jessica Miller was going to be in town for a conference, I got in touch with her for an interview. Talking to her was so awesome and I was blown away by her generous time and candidness. And I was so excited to know the journey of blogging4jobs and what makes them distinct from other career sites. She also gave me valuable insights on optimizing your blog for search engines which was actually an extra bonus for me. I know you all are excited to watch the interview and here it is!
Interview with Jessica Miller-Merrell, the founder of Blogging4Jobs, president and CEO of Xceptional HR and a leader in the HR community with more than 12 years of industry experience and is the author of Tweet This! Twitter for Business.
It really fascinates me that before the emergence of social media tools like Facebook and LinkedIn, Jessica used the dating websites to source job candidates. If you are passionate about your job you are highly likely to be innovative and strive to bring better results. From there on Jessica started researching the strategies for social recruiting tools and contributed valuable insights to the community through her blog and book
Here are few excerpts and insights that I learned from Jessica on how to be a successful blogger
Make it personal: Be specific and talk about the things that are important to you and that you are passionate about. Talk about something that you know and that you can relate to others through your experience.
Get it straight: She says content should be educational and entertaining. Think about your readers and understand what they want to hear from you. It is always challenging to come up with content that should be entertaining that people can laugh about and educational that they can learn from it.
Plan your article: Planning your content and keeping them relevant to the latest changes in your own arena is highly recommended. Have an editorial calendar and understand certain things that happen at different points in a particular year and customize your articles accordingly to be relevant to the times.
Network your ass off: Get to know the people who are relevant in your own field and sharing your thoughts will give you a broader perspective on various topics. More than that getting them to share your content will give you more visibility.
Be True to yourself: Just because you are young you might not have all the answers. So surround yourself with older mentors and younger mentors too, that will help you to talk from their point of view rather than just giving some BS that can harm your career.
Drive people to your blog: Blog is the center of your marketing universe but other social media tools are micro communities. Your blog should be the primary source that reflects your personal brand and use other social media tools like twitter, Facebook, YouTube LinkedIn to drive people to your blog. And she shares it in an info-graphic here.
