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We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page. I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other experts in this field who

by ecaron 17y ago

We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page. I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like http://jobsearch.about.com/ http://jobsearch.about.com/) 2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like http://blog.indeed.com/ http://blog.indeed.com/, http://blog.simplyhired.com/ http://blog.simplyhired.com/, http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ and http://monster.typepad.com/ http://monster.typepad.com/)

swombat 17y ago
It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good writer on your team). Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one: http://blog.indeed.com/ http://blog.indeed.com/ - fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves. http://blog.simplyhired.com/ http://blog.simplyhired.com/ - again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares. http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog - better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read. http://monster.typepad.com/ http://monster.typepad.com/ - better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles. None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed. By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market. I'd like to give our blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/ http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration". So there's multiple benefits to creating a good blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.

by ecaron 17y ago

swombat 17y ago

It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good writer on your team). Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one: http://blog.indeed.com/ http://blog.indeed.com/ - fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves. http://blog.simplyhired.com/ http://blog.simplyhired.com/ - again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares. http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog - better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read. http://monster.typepad.com/ http://monster.typepad.com/ - better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles. None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed. By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market. I'd like to give our blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/ http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration". So there's multiple benefits to creating a good blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.