Photo Credit: Cubosh
These posts in the blogosphere and LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform showcase employment trends describing why a personal blog or website is a vital 2015 professional development goal:
Ensure Your Professional Identity Isn’t Beholden to a Single Online Platform
Facebook changed its policy for business and fan pages to a pay-for-play model. Small business owners who built their livelihoods around that platform are struggling to adapt. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Program continues eating away the monthly incomes of entrepreneurial authors / writers.
Adam Singer published this warning five+ years ago in his classic post, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Here are key snippets of Adam’s foresight from 2009:
3. Remember, you’re essentially contributing to someone else’s network on Twitter – certainly there are returns, but make no mistake they profit from your attention. I know you might not have a problem with that because you gain something too, but it’s good to be conscious of that fact.
6. You own your work in a self-hosted blog and are in total control over how it is presented.
I know it’s not as “sexy” anymore (in reference to blogging) but it is still far more valuable and should not be discounted merely because the early adopters have shiny new object syndrome.
Show Our Stories How We Want to Tell Them
Long form content and blogging is coming back. Potential employers cite critical thinking and writing as key skills. Let’s take advantage of our personal blogs / websites to show our thinking, analysis, and stories.
Transforming a complex or technical insight into a simple story is rare and sought after:
“Crofting” Is The New World of Work
Hugh Macleod‘s home-spun wisdom from page 38 of his remarkable book, Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear speaks volumes:
My grandfather was a Scottish Highlands “crofter” — i.e., a small-time, mostly self-sufficient tenant farmer with his own little patch of land, who raised sheep and grew potatoes, turnips, and other stuff. And as I wrote in my second book, Evil Plans: hey, guess what — we’re all crofters now. Even people with secure day jobs in big corporations.
Thanks to the Internet, we all have a little electronic “croft” — an electronic smallholding — to call our own what is commonly referred to as our own digital identity, which we can cultivate, like a small farm, however we see fit.
The good news is that, unlike my grandfather, we don’t have to spend our whole lives growing potatoes and shearing sheep for a mere pittance. We can sell things people find valuable — art and cartoons in my case, maybe consulting gigs or whatever in your case….
The Internet makes all this possible.
What Are You Waiting For?
Go.
Your Turn
Please let me know if you agree or disagree with my thoughts in the comments. If you disagree, I would love to hear from you. I want to read, listen, and learn from YOUR PERSPECTIVE.
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