Five Reasons Why Blogging Is Your Best Career Move

In the midst of a troubled economy, I been having conversations with my job-seeking friends almost every day. What I've begun to notice is that whether they are aspiring social entrepreneurs, future diplomats or future music industry titans, one piece of my advice is always the same: start a blog.

There are about five reasons I've become convinced that starting a blog is the single best career move you can make:

1. Learning
To write a good blog you have to read everything. You may have a whole bunch of starter posts ready to go about U.S. relations with central Asia, but to keep yourself and your readers satisfied and returning, you'll be constantly looking for other writing that pushes your own thinking. In this way writing a blog becomes one of the single best ways to build your expertise.

2. Refining your passion
Many of us know roughly what type of career(s) sound appealing. Some of us have a particular industry we are or wish to be embedded in. But it's often more difficult to figure out what specific piece of the puzzle gets you most fired up. This blog has definitely helped me affirm which pieces of the wider world of social enterprise I'm most excited about. When you'll blog you'll find yourself drawn to certain topics; you'll read about people and think, "I want this job." Money can't buy that type of clarity of purpose.

3. Becoming a voice in the space
The cool thing about the blogosphere is that if you have interesting things to say, sooner or later people will start to find you. They'll begin to riff off of your ideas, in the meantime sending people your way with their links. This fuels on-going conversations with people in the field and pretty soon you have one of the top ten blogs on the agronomics of southeast Asia. I think the best blogging is a fundamentally symmetric mode of communications, in which the reader is equal to the writer. The blogosphere does respect credentials, but in the sense that if you're already an established expert in a field, people are likely to find you faster. If you're a good writer who adds value to the conversation, people will listen whether you went to Harvard or Hooters for college. There's simply no better way than blogging to become a voice in your field.

4. An excuse to network
There's nothing more important to your career than having a deep social network. Employers that don't have the time or resources to go out and recruit like McKinsey use social connections as a proxy for determining quality. But the thing is, networking is not just about quantity, its about quality. As you begin to establish your voice in the field, it gives you a great context to email or LinkedIn the brightest thinkers in your field, or the most interesting organizations. The thing that's different about having a blog is that you're actually looking to talk to them about something, rather than just networking for the sake of networking. You can write a post about their most recent book, and ask them what they think, for example. When you go to conferences, people will recognize you from your writing. Seriously, it's the best networking tool you have.

5. Social media expertise
The entire corporate infrastructure is literally freaking out as they feel like consumers are slipping through their fingers. They're beginning to realize that the old mode of advertising, marketing, and product differentiation just don't work - whether that's differentiating your cereal product or your undergraduate curriculum. And they recognize that there's something to this new "social media" thing where people talk to and interact with companies that seems to be really powerful. But by and large, they don't know how to harness it. As a blogger, you'll learn first hand about social media. You'll figure out when and how to engage with commenters. You'll sort out how personal to be. You'll get familiar with techniques for distributing your message. You'll almost certainly learn how to use Twitter and a host of other services. And in the process, you'll become a gateway to a brave new world for the next company that hires you.

All of this is predicated on one big thing, which is that if you blog, you blog hard. You can't write a crappy post every other week and hope to get a lot of traction, but if you're dedicated and thoughtful, blogging is the best career move you can make.