Enhancing your Blogging CV

I started my blog just over 5 years ago today, and I am incredibly proud of how far it has come. That said, many people just don’t understand blogging, and many still underappreciate or undervalue the work and the efforts involved. As someone who works in HR by day, I have chatted with a number of blogging friends about their CV, supporting them with job applications, interview preparation, or drafting of application forms, and been shocked to see that 9 times out of 10, they haven’t listed the blog on their skills or experience.

If you are a blogger, then the chances are that like me, you have been on a fairly significant learning journey since you started. Many of these skills you might even take for granted now as they have become second nature, but many of them, in fact the overarching majority will be transferable skills; skills that a prospective employer would see favourably, and as such, definitely something to be showcasing in your experience. These skills are likely to be particularly beneficial for those seeking employment within the marketing or social media management arena.

For those of you who haven’t outlined blogging on your CV, here are just some of the skills that you are likely to have enhanced via your blogging addiction.

Social Media Strategy

• Preparing and executing a successful social media strategy for a brand with X+ followers.
• Responsible for the creation, presentation and execution of a calendar of social media activity.
• Content planning – ensuring activity is proactively planned in advance to meet predetermined deadlines.
• Experience of utilising both paid and organic social media strategies.
• Experience in using competitions, promotions and creative activity to encourage additional followers / likes / engagement.
• Twitter – running of a brand’s Twitter page including scheduling tweets, utilising appropriate hashtags, encouraging two way communication, hosting Twitter Parties to encourage trending and responding to enquiries or feedback.
• Facebook – running of a brand’s Facebook page including scheduling content, utilising the branded content tool, participating in Facebook groups, sharing/creation of Facebook live videos.
• Instagram – experience of creative imagery production, use of boomerangs and Instagram Stories
• Experience of using social media management tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer or equivalent to schedule content in advance.
• Keeping abreast of the ever changing world of social media including new features, algorithm changes and enhancements that may have an impact on organic reach.
• Actively sourcing opportunities for back links, quotes and reference on other high authority sites.

Key achievements may include – 

• Building a community of X+ followers across my social channels within X months/years
• An average follower increase of X per month.
• An engagement rate of X% across my channels.
• Content was quoted in high quality articles on X website.

Statistics

• Ability to track and analyse effectiveness of social campaigns and website content using Google Analytics and Google Console.
• Monitoring performance on social channels against key competitors / complimentary brands.
• Basic SEO knowledge including use of keywords, alt text and meta descriptions. Ability to take steps to improve the readability and google ranking of website content.
• Experience of using insights to improve understanding of your followers demographics, including when your audience is most active and when engagement is at it’s highest.

Key achievements may include:

• High performing organic SEO traffic via google.
• Being at the top of google for specific keyword searches.

Website Editing

• Basic HTML knowledge.
• Ability to add and amend plugins on to WordPress sites.
• Ability to amend the settings of WordPress themes to match specific preferences and change the look and feel of a website.
• Adding and removing content as required.

Video Editing

• Experience of creating basic video content using iMovie or equivalent.

Photography

• Basic photo editing experience
• Ability to shoot in RAW and edit using Adobe Photoshop or equivalent.
• Sourcing of suitable royalty free imagery to be used across blog and social channels.

Copywriting

• Creation of high quality content, with strong proofreading and grammar skills.
• Creation of imagery to support content using Canva or equivalent.
• Generation of compelling content to deliver key messages and tailoring for audiences as required.
• Maintaining a consistent “voice” of the brand.
• Research and data gathering skills to ensure content generated is accurate and up to date.

Networking and Sales

• Experience representing the brand at networking events, building positive relationships with PRs and third party brands.
• Experience pitching for new business – utilising sales and negotiation techniques.

General

• Multitasking – ability manage multiple content streams simultaneously, as well as work to meet tight deadlines and manage changing priorities as required.

And I could go on….

This is just my initial brain dump of skills – I am confident that there are many more I will have missed!!

So the next time you respond “oh it’s just a blog” – how about you take another look? You could be missing a trick!

Lucy