Tip of the Day: Blog your way to Job Search success!

(Original post is located here.)

While there are many blogging tools out there, I find that I have become very fond of the free
BLOGGER service for most of my blogging needs, ever since Google acquired them and added the Blog button to the Google Toolbar. What this does is allow you to add web pages, with comments, directly to your blog from whatever site you are on with the push of a button.

For example, suppose you see a job listing in your local newsgroup.
The logical thing to do would be to go to the employer's site and see whether or not the job is listed there. Now here's where Blogging can come in handy. Say you are ready to apply for the job immediately - it's easy enough just to send in your resume and store all of the information in your Jobfiler job tracker. But suppose you aren't ready to apply - you need to revise your resume, or get your cover letter in order, or simply think about it. If you had a job search related Blog, you would simply blog that page, add whatever notes you want to associate with that job, and post it to your blog. Your blog would then become a running job search diary, which you can even add follow up comments to any single entry.

Some things to consider... if you are blogging your job search for your own records, it's important to set up the blog as PRIVATE (not publically available). Of course, there are folks who blog their search publically, but that's really a judgement call on your part. Anything you post in the public domain could come back to bite you. Read this article on Blogger about the guy that got fired over his blog.

How-To's (skip this if you're not trying to set your blog to Private)When you create your account on Blogger , you can specify whether the blog is public or private. If you mark it as "Private" and want to keep it that way, you should also add the robots meta tag in the header of your template (and if you FTP to your own directory, placing the robots.txt file in the root is also a good idea). And of course, set your options on Blogger to Ping Weblogs = No.

Here are some sample jobsearch blogs which I have found on the web:
Trey's Job Search
All About Jen
Mike McBride: Life of a one-man IT Department

On a related note, here are some jobsearch information blogs, offering advice, articles, etc.
The Job Files
http://bostonworks.boston.com/blog/
Not Working for a Living
The Monster Blog
Being Bold

And for those of you who would like an alternative solution to Blogger, here are some other ways to get your blog up and running in a short amount of time:
BBlog
Square Space
eBloggy

Good luck, and happy hunting!