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10.15.07
Can Your Personal Blog Hurt Your Career?
 By
Steven Bradley
If you're visibly associated with a corporate blog should you also write a personal blog? If you do how far can you push your own opinions, especially when they might differ from the official stance at your company?
Could your personal blog come back to hurt the company you work for? Might co-workers find your blog and begin to think less of you? Could any of these things ultimately hurt your career?
These are some of the questions Kristine is wondering about at the moment and which led her to start a thread at Small Business Forum to get some feedback.
Here's the dilemma. I know (and I can't emphasize this strongly enough) that I would talk about everything. It's very unlikely that any subject would be off limits, and I would be honest.
Several of my work friends are very computer literate, read blogs already, and would certainly find the blog. Not to mention customers for our companies, who read the blogs I write for work under my own name, who could also easily find a personal blog if I wrote as myself.
my options, as I see them, are three. 1)Don't have a personal blog at all, 2)write the personal blog under some sort of penname, or 3) say the heck with it and write it as myself and take the consequences as they come.
The issue isn't one that really has an answer and definitely not one answer that would apply to all people and companies. In the end this is one of those decisions you have to make for yourself and Kristine will need to evaluate and weigh the pros and cons and decide what's best for her.
Can you do something to prevent employers from discovering your blog? If you put something online you have to accept that anyone might find it. Writing under a pen name will work only so far, though it can help to hide things to some extent. Another option is adding a noindex meta robots tag or using a robots.txt file to let search engines know not to index your personal blog. You can also make sure not to tell anyone with a connection to your company abut your blog. By making your blog harder to find it becomes less likely someone will find it. Of course if you make it so hard to find why have a blog in the first place?
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You could also make it difficult to tell that the same person writing your blog is the same person writing your company blog. The more common your name the easier it is to do, but if you stay away from revealing things that could identify you at both it might not be so hard.
Potential Benefits Of A Personal Blog
It's probably easier to see the downside here, but writing a personal blog could actually benefit both you and your company. Off the top of my head: • Your blog becomes popular directing more traffic and customers to your company
• Your opinions lead to more transparency and trust in both you and your company
• Your blog gives you an outlet for writing about topics you can't on your company blog, which allows you to grow as a writer
• Your co-workers and employers like your blog leading to a better career path in your current company
• Your blog leads to greater personal branding leading to a better career path All of the above are realistic. Sharing your opinions doesn't have to be bad. It comes down to what opinions you share and how you share those opinions. A few quick searches led me to examples of personal blog success stories.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization
specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username
vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build
and optimize websites and market them online.
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