Start blogging to show your knowledge and passion - March 25, 2016

Your name is going to be Googled. Maybe it is a prospective employer, your current employer wondering what you are up to, perhaps a customer or prospective customer, or maybe even someone you want to date.

What these people want to find is evidence of a thoughtful, interesting person who is knowledgeable in their field and passionate about something.

The best way to show this knowledge- and passion – is by having a blog or blogs. You might have a blog about your passion and another about your profession.

Then when someone Googles you, they will find positive evidence of your capabilities. This can only help to build your reputation, may lead to new jobs, promotions, new customers and more.

Having positive information on the web, even if you create it yourself, can go a long way to diffuse negative information that might be out there.

For example, a restaurant with negative Yelp reviews can redeem itself somewhat with a blog by the owner talking about the challenges they have had and how they overcame them. The blog could have photographs and positive stories written about groups or special customers who have enjoyed the restaurant.

A project manager might have a blog that talks about the challenges of his job, the solutions he had found, the extra education he has sought and perhaps stories about trade shows he’s visited and lesson learned there.

And I have the FamilyTechOnliine.com blog with these columns and also with the occasional extra information families would be interested in.

Anyone Googling me will find out pretty quick I like technology. And, if they read my blog, they’ll find out I’m interested in aviation history, journalism and many other things.

I read a wide variety of blogs. One is written by a movie lighting tech talking about the grunt work in that field. Another is by a noted writer of “Frasier,” “Cheers” and “MASH.” He gives lots of insights into that business.

Before starting a blog, search for blogs of people in professions like yours and your hobbies. Figure out ways to have a unique voice.

Creating your own blog is fairly easy and often free. Blogs do not have to be updated daily, although it is good to be fairly regular in posting. Weekly, even monthly is good enough.

You could simply create a Facebook Page dedicated to your writings. I am not a fan of that. Facebook does not show all your posts to all your subscribers.

I use Google’s free Blogger platform. It offers easy to use authoring tools and built-in analytics so I can see how many people are reading my blog and what entries are being read the most.

It has integration with Google’s AdSense, so if you want to monetize you blog with ads, you can.

Wordpress.com is another popular free, hosted blog platform. You can also download WordPress and run it on your own server, but the hosted platform saves you from having to do frequent security and feature updates that can get involved.

Tumblr is another free site. I’d stay away from it as a home for reputation building content. It is used by a lot of casual content. Some is adult-themed and others often just silly.

Tumblr is to blogging like Hotmail is to email. A Hotmail email address will get you your email, but it doesn’t exactly inspire leading-edge tech knowledge.

Blogger and WordPress let you use their domains, or you can buy a personal domain to give your blog a unique, professional address. You can add media content like photos and video easily. Comments can be turned on to enable conversations with your readers.

Be sure to link to other information about yourself on your blog. These can be your LinkedIn profile, your videos on Youtube, your Twitter account and of course, an email address for people to contact you.

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