Super Ghost Blogger

If you’re a creative person, you’re also quite likely to have a blog which reflects your work and your creative instincts. That’s almost a natural reflex for the truly creative person, but it’s often overlooked that blogs are good PR and profile builders, too. The problem is that many creative blogs aren’t what you’d call “portfolio material”. If for example you’re a person who does corporate brochure printing artwork or copy, you can ramp up your portfolio in the process.

Creative blogs and professional presentation

“Presentation” is a word which often gets on creative people’s nerves. The fact is that other people, particularly business contacts, don’t necessarily perceive anything but the most glaringly obvious things. That’s where the blog comes into the equation. You can present yourself in another way, literally spell it out, with a blog.

For example:

Blog A is an interesting, if erratic, collection of thoughts, information, and has multiple types of content including mixed media, slideshows, and a lot of text. The material is extensive, all over the place, and you have to go through 50 pages of archives to find specific things, even if site search is working.

Blog B is exactly the same thing with the same materials, but it’s categorized, laid out simply, and site search does work. There are even links to previous articles, providing some continuity. There are also links to technical terms, explaining them, rather than letting the reader guess what they mean.

Now consider for a minute- What do you find most maddening about your own favorite blogs:

• A sea of typos and hieroglyphs
• Huge pages full of pictures and about 3 lines of text
• Some gigantic articles which don’t even have paragraphs, let alone headings
• Dire graphics
• Dreary site design
• Dysfunctional links

The point is that like you, the person looking at your blog has no idea of any of the issues involved in how your blog was put together. They can only go on what they see. That’s what “presentation” means, in practice, to your profile.

Raising the blog standard

There are plenty of ways of improving your creative blog and making things a lot easier for yourself in blog maintenance, as well as providing a good profile:

1. Get good blogging software that doesn’t create typos, particularly in the headers.
2. Create tabs or buttons which will work as categories.
3. Update your materials regularly.
4. Do strict quality controls on everything on your site. (If you wouldn’t show it to a prospective client, just don’t publish it.)

This really does help, both you and your blog readers. The categories drastically improve site functionality. People can find what they’re looking for. A client who’s interested in your business card printing ideas doesn’t have to wade through the 12 pages of Bauhaus critiques to find them.

Your blog is who you are, as far as other people know. It’s also how they see your professional creativity. Take care of the profile, and it will take care of you.