Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [79]
You never know who’s going to find one of your comments interesting and now can follow the links to learn more about you. This process effectively presells you to your target audience without having to set up interviews. Some may ask you to contribute a post on their blogs (do accept, if it is a reputable resource) and you should offer likewise. Don’t wait to volunteer a guest post if you respect others’ blogs and have started to build rapport with them by commenting on their posts, and so on. This typically results in the blogger initiating direct communication with you. Before you know it, people will start linking to your posts and forwarding links about you to others looking for an expert like you—did you realize you are one at this point?—without your even knowing!
Ready for the Next Level and Scale Up Efficiently?
Now you’re making my job of finding you easier. Here’s how you can make it a lot easier for all the recruiters out there: get your thoughts distributed even more widely by using more social networks. When you register with sites like MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others that let you blog and share content in other ways, you increase your exposure—and thus the chance of being noticed by the right people.
What are those other ways to share content? Audio, video, and social bookmarking are 3 hot ones nowadays. Social bookmarking is sharing your favorite links with others. Sites like ClipIt (www.clipit.com), Digg (www.digg.com), and Delicious (www.del.icio.us/) facilitate this. If you discover neat resources, post them. You’ll get more fans.
With simple free tools and a $20 webcam on your end, you can produce short audio and/or video segments called podcasts that can include whatever you’d type in a blogpost, plus open other content possibilities thanks to these dynamic media. Why not interview experts in your field and post those on your blog? Or do a short how-to video yourself. When you go to an event, blog about what you see—and let them see it, too. For great examples of online video and podcasts that will give you ideas, go to Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) and Everyzing (search.everyzing.com) and type a unique phrase to find relevant content. These search YouTube.com and many other sites all at once.
Now you’re saying, “Glenn, wait, I don’t have time to post on all these sites and do all this multimedia!” Time to leverage Web 2.0: tools like Hellotxt (www.hellotxt.com) and Ping (www.ping.fm) allow you to post once and that message is auto-posted to your accounts on all of those sites. If a site doesn’t let you cross-post multimedia, you can at least enter a text link to your podcasts.
Also, many of the tools to add multimedia and all kinds of other functionality to your blog/web site are available free. Usually called widgets, you can add them with little technical knowledge, especially if you use a popular blogging platform like Typepad.com or Wordpress.org. Some great sources of widgets are Widgetbox.com, Sixapart.com, and Widgetoko.com. These will make your blog more interesting and further grow your audience.
All this may strike you as overwhelming. But remember, you don’t have to do everything discussed above to succeed—though the impact of each is synergistic with the others. Try a couple of the techniques that resonate with you, at first. As you start to see success with positive response from interesting professional contacts, that will motivate you to try other things. Even after you land that next job, you’ll still be using social networks because their career value continues even while you’re working!
Glenn Gutmacher is founder of www.recruiting-online.com and vice president of www.JobMachine.net He shows corporate employers and staffing firms how to find job seekers of any skill set, industry,