Blogopoly

A Blog can be used to raise awareness of one's business, or to demonstrate expert knowledge of your target market.

Can a blog help raise your personal profile?
Yes it can using the same principles as a business does to benefit from a blog. The term "to google someone" is becoming more and more popular as people use Google (or other search engines) to discover information about people, not just companies, products or research topics. For example the Bel-air hotel in Los Angeles googles guests to find out information that they can use to create a personalized service, such as assigning a room with morning sun for guest that like to go jogging at dawn. For those that would potentially google YOU, ablog would be a useful source of that information.

You may think this would never happen to you, but apply this to a situation where everyone need to market themselves - the jobhunt. How many times have you felt short-changed by having such a small amount of time to impress your interviewer and feel the resume format isn enough to really showcase your knowledge? Everyone has felt like this at one time - and a lot of people get asked the question "what is your knowledge of this industry?" which is often difficult to demonstrate in an interview. If you had a blog where your wrote about your chosen or target industry, you could always invite them to read your blog which they can digest over time after your interview. I mentioned my Internet Marketing Blog on my Resume once and was impressed to have an interviewer once remark that they are an avid reader of my blog and they brought it to the meeting to show to the other interviewer. Well respected blogger, Robert Scoble claims that his blog helped him get his current job with Microsoft. In response to whether blogging played a role in the selection process, Robert remarks:

"Yes, weblogging played a major role. For one, it helped get me noticed. For two, it helped people inside Microsoft see how I thought without needing me to come up for an interview. For three, during the interviews, we were able to really get to the point of things, since they already knew my strengths and weaknesses."

As you can see blogging can help improve your jobsearch and help you in those awkward interviews where you don't feel you really did yourself justice. Blogging can make you famous, fame leads to increased opportunities.