If you’re looking for a new job, or a new career, one of the suggestions career experts like myself offer is: LinkedIn. Recruitment consultants crawl round LinkedIn like truffle hogs in an oak-wood, and LinkedIn provides an opportunity to showcase your sills and expertise to both speculative enquirers and those with a more serious interest.

In a recent blog post, Tony Restell proposes that, rather than relying on LinkedIn, job-seekers should concentrate their energies on blogging. In his view, LinkedIn doesn’t enable the recruiter to distinguish genuinely good candidates from poor ones. A blog helps you stand out from the pack.

To a large extent I agree with him, but there are a couple of areas where you need to be cautious: consistency and connection.

Consistency and Connection

As far as consistency is concerned, once you’ve started, you need to keep going. If your blogging schedule is inconsistent, particularly if there are large gaps between posts, you may look disorganised, or lacking in focus.

In terms of connection, how will people find your blog? Of course, you can mention it on your LinkedIn profile, and tell your friends on Facebook, but ideally you want to have a range of strategies for encouraging people to come and visit

So, if you are thinking of going down the blog route, what ‘s the best strategy?

Here are some questions to consider before you ever embark on a blogging approach for career success.

• What do you want to achieve with your blog? Is it simply a new job, or are you in this for the long haul? Do you want to become an acknowledged expert in your field, or are you content to operate in the void?
• How much time, energy and money do you want to spend on creating and maintaining your blog? This will depend on what resources you have available, and what image you want to project.
• What help do you NEED in setting up and maintaining your blog? I have an IT background, including IT security, and at first I set up my blogs myself. However, I’ve come unstuck on a couple of occasions, and I’ve finally realised that I was not put on this planet to get down and dirty with the innermost secrets of WordPress.
• Even if you have a strong technical bent, how are you with the written word? Most mainstream recruiters will be put off by typos or poor grammar.

There are plenty of ways to set up a blog cheaply and cheerfully  with relatively little technical knowledge – for example by using blogger, wordpress.com (this is different from wordpress.org, which I am using) or one of the other free platforms. You can also do video blogs using Youtube. But these might not project the image you want, or give you maximum control of your site.

So, if you want to stand out from the pack, blog by all means, but do it in a strategic way to ensure you achieve your goals.

If you need help with finding your career direction, or help with using a blog as part of your plan to stand out from the pack, then contact The Career Success Doctor for a complimentary Career Quickstart Conversation.