Your Blog is Your Resume

By Melanie Blodgett. Photography by Jimmy Marble.

I’ve shared here before, that the key to making money online (especially if your blog isn't huge) is to diversify and make money from numerous sources. Personally, over half of my income comes from contributing to other sites. If you feel that landing contributing gigs is what you’d like to do next, then pay attention as I detail the first step today.

The first step to landing a contributor position is to polish your own blog. In the blogging world, the traditional paper resume that you perfected in college is obsolete: your blog your resume. That means, in order to land that dream position, it’s got to look polished. And since we all want to land a dream position - let’s get to work!

These 5 steps will put you on the right track:

1. Imagine being a potential employer and seeing your site for the first time. Go in with fresh eyes and only look at it for a very short time. What’s the impression that you get? Are there blaring mistakes that need to be fixed right away? Would you get a sense of your personality and blogging style right away?
2. Have a few friends do the same exercise listed above and provide constructive criticism.
3. Make the suggested changes that you believe will make your site better. Whether that means hiring a designer to make it more aesthetically pleasing, hiring a programmer to clean up the backend, or purchasing your own domain--you may have to spend some money to make some money.
4. Once your happy with the overall design and the way things run, focus on your content. Perform the same exercise where you pretend you’re the employer and look through your first page of posts. Does it represent what type of work you can offer right away? Are your images up to par? Does your writing reflect your style? If you feel like you could improve, do whatever you can to do just that! Creating good content takes a lot of time and work, but remember, that’s essentially what will earn you money.
5. Show it off! Put your hard work out there and pitch away.

If you’d like to learn more about making money online, join me for my class Bringing Home the Bacon When Your Blog Isn’t Huge on March 25th.

Comments

[Bebe Pies]

Great Post! If you run two blog sites is it a good idea to include both sites when contacting places you would like to contribute - or just pick one?

[Janika R.]

That is great piece of Advice.

http://lovelybusybee.blogspot.com/

[Deb @ home life simplified]

This is exactly what I need right now - I already write for one site thanks to being approached, but now I want to explore seeking out other paid gigs.

[Melanie]

Bebe Pies,

I don't think it would hurt to include both blogs that you manage. It will show your versatility.

[Laicie]

This is such great advice, thank you! I'm signed up for class and can't wait to learn more (and will probably learn the answer to this question) but in the meantime would you recommend pitching yourself as a contributor using just your blog as a resume (so, no specific post to attach to the pitch?) or waiting until you have something specific to pitch?

[Karen Judge]

I gotta make this happen!

kj

[Kim]

I don't mean to sound rude, but I'm surprised at the number of professional bloggers who use your/you're incorrectly. I know in some cases, it might be a typo, but these details are also an important part of our blogging resumes.

[vinay]

thanks for sharing