8 Habits of Successful Bloggers by Annabel Candy

Too few companies (in Finland) are actively working on their employer social footprint. Employer social footprint refers to everything the search engines list about your company as an employer that positively add to your employer brand. In our previous posting we wrote about why it's worth for an employer to blog. I found the following 8 habits of successful bloggers written by Annabel Candy, who is an australian social media blogger. I'd like to share these with you. 1. Effective bloggers take risks Most successful bloggers have one thing in common: they've started blogs that failed. They don't stop trying new things at the first sniff of success either, their blogs keep evolving and changing to move with the times and with their readers. You have to be brave when you start blogging, then keep taking those risks and keep innovating. Not every idea will work. Many will fail, but if you don't keep taking risks and trying new things your blog will get stale and your readers will get bored. 2. Effective bloggers are creative If you're ready to take risks you need to come up with creative ideas to run with. As time goes on it can feel harder to come up with and act on new ideas that keep adding value to your blog. It's critical to keep acting creatively, and then fine tune those ideas that have legs. If you want to be truly creative you'll need to keep taking action and develop a thick skin. 3. Effective bloggers are really passionate You're passionate about what you do, aren't you? But the whole idea of being passionate about your niche is such a cliché, I can see you're just about to skip this bit. Yes, you might know you're passionate about your topic — but you need to make sure your readers know it too. You need to make sure your passion jumps off the screen from your blog, your Facebook page and your Twitter account so that your readers love hanging out with you and don't take their attention or business elsewhere. 4. Effective bloggers are visible and engaging I'm always astonished by how many new bloggers see comments as being a pain in the neck. It seems they look at comments as something that only eats up their time. Effective bloggers see their blog readers as interesting people who they naturally want to interact with them. They reply to comments on their blog posts and talk to their readers on other social media because they value them. The best bloggers focus on creating strong content that resonates with their readers. They're not afraid to be provocative or share personal stories. They have that unique voice and point of view which creates reader loyalty. Effective bloggers really talk to people. They show they care, and engage their readers rather than just going through the motions of networking because it has to be done. 5. Effective bloggers are disciplined and organized If you've got one of these traits, you’re onto a good thing. If you have both, you'll go far. The top bloggers are able to focus on the big picture and have the discipline to stick with it. They have organized systems with editorial calendars planned months in advance, lists of RSS feeds for blog reading, and deadlines for new products they're developing. Like many good traits, you're not going to nail discipline and organization overnight, but if you keep working on them, and keep improving your productivity, your blogging will improve. 6. Effective bloggers are self-aware They know what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to work to them (or through them) to achieve their goals. You need to know your limitations and learn how to delegate the tasks you can't do well, or don't enjoy, to people who can take care of them more effectively than you. Things like blog design, technical issues, or editing can be handed over to other people or organizations. If you're not a natural born writer you can even pay someone to ghost write your blog posts for you. 7. Effective bloggers use a variety of media In 1995 I signed up for an Master of Arts program in Design for Interactive Multimedia. We spent a lot of time working out which media would best communicate our desired outcomes. We spent spent days debating if a particular point would be best taught through video, with images, or in text. But out in the real world, it doesn't work like that. Bloggers are governed by budget and time constraints. It's easy to stick to text and hope for the best, but more and more bloggers are turning to video, audio, and more. Video doesn't have to be a difficult undertaking, and it needn't cost an arm and a leg. And it's a powerful way to get your point across or to make your point more accessible to your readers. Nothing will personalize you and your blog better than video, even if it's just a two-minute production filmed on your iPhone. 8. Effective bloggers diversify their income Having multiple income streams is a good idea in any business. It's key if you want to make money blogging. It protects you if one income stream fails, and allows you to safely test new ways of earning money. There are many ways to build a business around a good blog. You may use your blog to build your profile, sell your services, open up new career opportunities, or partner with the right people to develop software or instructional courses. If you've grown your readership and built trust and authority with them, you can make money directly through your blog by selling advertising, offering sponsored blog posts, or becoming an affiliate. (These aren’t Copyblogger's preferred models, but they work well for many bloggers.) A combination of some or all of the above will increase the income that your blog generates, whether directly or indirectly. It's not what happens, but how you act on it Whatever habits you do or don't currently possess, one thing is inevitable when it comes to effective blogging: The bumps and turns will pop up regularly. You will reach plateaus that you feel you won't be able to break. The only way to get over those humps and through those plateaus is to keep blogging, to slowly adjust your habits, and keep learning and applying new techniques that work for you. The problem is not that these challenges come along, it's that we don’t face them correctly. Annabel Candy targets her blogs towards small business owners and writers but I think us HR and employer brand specialists can take can learn from Annabel's advice and experience and take something with us, don't you? -SR-

Why it's worth to blog as an HR

Don't you agree, that these days finding and attracting your future employees is not only time consuming and expensive but also darn difficult? There are more and more channels, networks and social media where we should be present and active at all times. What if you could enhance your employing power by attracting people to you instead of you hammering each and every door possible in the attempt to find them? Employer marketing is more than job advertising Generally marketing in recruitment goes by the name of job advertising. In other words, we post the vacancy to selected job boards. But who do we reach? Mostly those who are actively looking for new career opportunities. But who are they? And what if our company brand isn't appealing, attractive and known in our recruitment target groups? Write a blog! Blogging regularly is an easy way to establish an employer image in your target group as well as engage the potential future employees into your company culture, values, business and ways of working. Blogging shouldn't be limited to the company CEO. Job seekers are generally interested in different types of stories than what comes out of a CEO's pencil (or pad). Even though blogging is made super easy these days by variety of services offering free blogging tools, such as blogger or posterous, the best way to draw traffic to your company is a blog integrated into the corporate site with an URL containing the company's domain name. But this is getting technical now. Why search engine ranking matters to HR too? When job seekers hunt for career opportunities, they tend to google or go directly to the websites of companies they find appealing. If your corporate brand is not appealing or known, you need to make sure google finds you. Writing a blog is an excellent way to enhance your search engine rankings. I won't go into technical details but in a big picture, the more you write (and tag) about keywords job seekers are interested in, the better will be your company's search engine rankings. You want job seekers to find you, become attracted to you (your company that is of course) and start looking for and forwarding around your vacancies. As the forwarding is made very easy in the social media, needless to say how these little agents can spread the word to millions of people before you count to ten! This is way more cheaper than buying a job advert and way more effective than copy pasting links to your job adverts by yourself. What to blog about? What interests you if you were a job seeker? Of course any data that helps the job seeker to improve their chances in finding the perfect job for them. You want to create content that is interesting, exciting, valuable and easily forwardable. Why? Because the web is full on material that is of no interest to anyone. So it's a waste of your time and space in this universe to produce something of no interest to anyone. Examples of worth while content: Your recruitment criteria, what they mean and why they are important to your company Your company culture in pictures, people and action Tips on what you appreciate in a good job application Advice on how to prepare for an interview at your company Success stories of career development in your company Examples of what opportunities exist for personal development in your company General salary data from your industry Information about industry related vacancies News and innovations within your industry Your goal with blogging should be to get our content to spread across as far and wide as possible so that next time you advertise a vacancy and people google your company what they find is a lot of valuable content that convinces them to apply to such an interesting company and employer. In our recent blog "Pushing or Pulling talents" we wrote about the importance of employer marketing. Being "out there" on the web with your content sheds a light into who you are as an employer and this will most likely make job seekers pay attention to your job advertising in the future as well. What do you think? Do you blog and has it been a good lead generator for your recruitment? We'd like to hear!