There is so much more to finding employment and creating a career today than many people realize at the get go. While many people no doubt find positions by sending out their resumes and custom tailoring their cover letters, today’s tech centric-society lends itself well to new and more appropriate forms of self-promotion. Blogging has become a hobby, career, and tool for thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Using a personal blog to essentially brand yourself and market your skills to the professional world has fast become the approach in today’s harsh job market. Follow these four blogging tips and self-marketing basics to create a personal blog that sells your best professional qualities and helps potential employers gain special insight into your abilities.

Simplicity and Clarity

The key to a successful website of any sort is simplicity and clarity. This is true for most things, including marketing. You want to be clear and direct with your intent and purpose. With your personal blog, you should create something that carefully communicates what you wish to tell. Your writing style should be clear and to the point. Tell your readers up front what your interests are, what the purpose of your blog is, what your accomplishments are, and what you wish to gain from them reading your material. There’s no point in using fluff language or fillers. Just tell people exactly who you are and what you are doing and see how they respond. Of course, I mean all of this directness to be done in a professional manner. You must sell yourself through your blog. Be clear and simple in your intent.  Continue reading

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CEOs are fired or forced to resign. It happens, as in business, as well as in private life, some relationships are not bound to last forever. Even Steve Jobs, who will always be one of the archetypes for CEOs for a long time from now, severed his connections with Apple at a certain point.

Being fired or having rumors spread about having been forced to leave a company is a crisis for a professional’s personal brand. Other potential employers will be influenced by some other player’s decision to fire their CEO and not want to hire that very same person to lead their company. So how one handles their personal brand while and after being fired is not something that should be taken lightly.

I had a conversation on this topic with a CEO that left a tech company very suddenly, and the details of the event were never fully talked about. At least not in the open! The person in question was commenting on the Yahoo – Carol Bartz breakup and said that was the way to do it: let everyone know what’s going on instead of protecting the interests of a company that just got rid or you. I asked why they had taken a different approach and the answer was that immediately after the event, they were unable to separate their own interests from those of the former employer.  Continue reading

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It’s not slang, it’s not cute, it’s just bad grammar. Slang does not mean you are entitled to behave as if grammar never existed, there are some mistakes native speakers will never make, no matter how much slang they add to their songs. Please, pretty please, when you decide to write songs in foreign languages, get someone to proofread them for you. Those singing won’t look good. Frankly, the result is just the opposite, it makes them look bad.

Now, repeat after me “Listen….to”, ” Listen….to” not just “Listen”. It’s “I never listen to what they say”, please don’t take out the “to”. Oh, and it’s “has come” not “has came”. And if you’re singing about a boy, please call him “moreno”, not “morena”. Unless he’s a girl who used to be a boy. Or she’s a boy who used to be a girl!

I know English songs are trendy. I know adding a little bit of Spanish spice is also cool. But handle with care, it will make those singing your lyrics look better. Don’t help them damage their brand. They are perfectly able to do so themselves. I know, I’ve heard some interviews on the radio that have made me laugh so hard I could barely drive.

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Often times, we see what people put out there. Their personal choice of branding influences our perception. We see this serious anchorman, all dressed up, nice suit, all business look. Think Tom Green. Would you imagine him in a freestyle hip hop duo with Xzibit? And yet he did get into it! Check it out and make up your own mind abut what the man can do.

Personal brands can change; we can reposition ourselves, the same way it happens with products and services. We are never bound by the limits of the image we have projected out there. But a good personal brand that people recognize will always help us promote new projects. Millions of possibilities if we ever get bored, only one rule: actually be good at it

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