Blogging strategies find workplace niche

About a year ago, Cory Miller, the communications director for Quail Springs Baptist Church, started a blog on his Web site, www.churchcommunicationspro.com.

It was a way for him to establish himself in the field of church communications and provide a scratch pad for ideas to connect churches with technology.

He's since developed virtual colleagues in Australia, Japan and elsewhere and has been invited to talk about Web design and blogging at an annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Mobile, Ala.

"Blogging by far is the cheapest and best way I've found to establish myself in my industry and field,” Miller, 31, said. "It's opened doors that might not have otherwise opened — or not for quite a while longer.”

Miller posted on the Web site of syndicated career columnist Penelope Trunk, who hired him in December to design her blog (www.penelopetrunk.com), written about in TIME magazine and the London Observer. The second job has more than doubled the income of his day job, allowing him and his wife to buy a house.

"What started as an initial comment on my blog after I linked to her, developed into a neat e-mail dialogue about blogging strategies,” Miller said.

The successful networking scenario comes straight from Trunk's new book, "Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success.”

"Find a blogger you want in your network and start commenting on his blog,” Trunk writes. "Inserting yourself into that person's online community makes you a de facto part of his network.”

Blogging is huge among recruiters, public relations professionals and marketers, Trunk said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Employers, she said, regularly Google perspective employees to learn more about them.

"Blogging gives you a way to control what employers see because Google indexes and rates sites in a way that makes blogs come up highest in Google searches,” she said.

And blogging is a great tool for people in Oklahoma, "which is not the technical center of the universe,” Trunk said.

"It's a great equalizer,” she said. "Comments from someone in San Francisco are no more meaningful than those from someone in Oklahoma City.”

Blogging has joined instant messaging and social networks like MySpace and Facebook as emerging technology in participatory cyberspace, said Teresa Valdez Klein, spokeswoman for Washington-based Parnassus Ventures.

The company sponsors a Blog Business Summit that's been touring the country since 2004.

"Blogging is a way for companies to engage with their customers and show them that their employees are nice, hardworking people like them,” Klein said.

Bloggers also are finding all kinds of ways to make money. They're signing up with independent advertising distributors, striking revenue-sharing deals with large aggregators, landing direct sponsorships by corporations and getting hired to blog for companies.

A graduate of Stanford University, Ramit Sethi, 24, of Silicon Valley, Calif. started blogging about personal finance (www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com) a few years ago, after he blew half of a $2,000 scholarship investing in the stock market.

Now he gives speeches on saving, banking and investing, has signed a book deal and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal.

"All that was out there on personal finance was from Fidelity or Wells Fargo, things written by old white men for old white men,” Sethi said.

"I wanted to make the topic plain and for young people, like how to have enough money to go out on the weekend.”