Are you creating your personal brand with a differentiated online portfolio?
Over time, I learned that all knowledge acquired during any learning period or during a specific challenge generates value.
“In the job market, there are two types of people.
- There are those people who only take courses, study theory, collect certificates and send out résumés that will never be read.
- There are those people who work with a Blue Ocean strategy, optimize their time by doing practical projects from the beginning, build a differentiated portfolio and create a personal branding that makes the competition irrelevant.” Carlos Melo
It is prevalent that professionals working in the technology job market often learn something new daily but do not share the knowledge, so what was it worth? What did he add?
It is even more common for people to start looking for better opportunities and recognition, accumulate course certificates, and send massive resumes. Still, is there an alternative for this professional to become a reference? Gain authority and be recognized in this area of expertise?
Content production can be a possible solution to these and other dilemmas; with this initiative, people looking for and studying the subject will start to find, follow and share your publications, leading you to become a reference in the matter.
How do they all do?
Almost daily, some digital influencers will argue that the portfolio is just a set of well-structured projects in a code repository like Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket. Worked for some acquaintances, as another developer mined their code, found it interesting, and promoted the person to a selective process.
Others will defend that participating in competitions related to a specific subject on platforms like Kaggle is a differential. These competitions often involve more than one company, and the best are often called upon to work.
Some will say it’s necessary to have a project running, ready to be used in presentations and job interviews. During my graduation, I met some colleagues who got their first job by showing that they already had some knowledge in this way.
And finally, publishing and sharing posts and articles on social media can also be a way to create a portfolio. During my professional experience, I followed a data scientist who had never worked in the field, only had an academic background, being hired with a salary above ten thousand reais just for publishing on LinkedIn.
The portfolio can be created and shared in different ways; no one is better than the other; the important thing is that there is space for everyone; we excite a little of our creativity and acquired knowledge.
What to post?
Hyper: following some influencers, you can see that they will post and discuss what people are looking for or learning, so you can use this wave to build content quickly, constantly referencing the content and adding to the range with your point of view.
Review: looking at the way some content is made, usually you will notice that something is missing; this is an opportunity to create a post from this gap; to prove your point, you will probably have to take some time referencing some other content.
Papers, abstracts, articles: how many times was it necessary to carry out research to build a project, writing, or abstract, delivered to a teacher, evaluated and then forgotten, if this content is shared, it is possible that other people around the world can be helped and that is, it is possible to gain authority on the subject.
Technical challenges experienced during work: how many times, due to lousy documentation, lack of discussions about the problem in forums, and the lack of people who master the subject, lead to a construction of something new; imagine that other people will experience the same problem, and you can solve everything with one post.
Something outside your line of research: how many times do we find ourselves consuming content about something totally outside of what we are generally studying, your critical view of the subject is a massive difference in this post.
Where to post?
In technology, it is prevalent for professionals to create their websites and share their content for them, but this usually only works for people who already have a large audience on social media and can easily convince other users from other platforms to access yours.
Another way is to use a platform that already has a large audience. For example, if people produce videos, YouTube or Twitch might be attractive; if they are textual publications, we can use platforms like Medium and hashnode itself.
Is monetizing possible?
Many professionals do not create content for the internet because they do not see financial returns and think that they are often dedicating the time that would be better used to study or that they will have a minimal return, thereby losing an opportunity to earn extra income.
On YouTube or Twitch, content can be monetized by the number of views, subscription to the channel or a restricted area, and live donations.
On Medium, you can sign up for the partner program for content writers and producers, earning money for the time subscribers to the platform spend reading your publications.
The professional can create a course and sell it on a platform such as Hotmart or Udemy, using the various social networks to promote and propagate content that influences a specific audience to consume that material.
It is also possible to create and sell a book on Amazon for free, where many people make their books and use Hotmart to generate some affiliate system and increase the sale of their books.
One way to gain more and more followers is paid mentoring, where a professional sells the possibility for others to participate in a specific learning group.
These are some ways to monetize learning and content construction, each of them has criteria to be followed. For each platform, it is necessary to go through some registration and follow some guidelines to monetize successfully.
Learn to hit bubbles outside your audience:
Most of the posts we have online will try to explain and sell to focus the language, make the post format target a specific “target audience” more important than that is to make the post clear and exciting so that both laypeople and seniors can understand and enjoy this publication.
In addition to having flashy titles that are not too direct or too long, an exciting image, there are almost magical features that can be used during sharing and make a real difference, for that:
Use hashtags(“#”): it is pervasive in social networks that certain groups of people are following a specific subject, using hashtags, we can reach these people.
Use at-sign(“@”): in addition to referring to the content in the publication’s subjects with hashtags, we can reach people who follow the “influencers” of that niche, using the at the sign.
These resources can help you reach a different group of people, and I always like to ask some acquaintances, like and share the publication with your critic about it, so my post tends to be more driven on the networks.
Watch your metrics:
When I started, I believed that the number of followers mattered a lot, and the more followers I had, the bigger the group of people that my publication would reach; this was one of the biggest mistakes I made.
Even the so-called “influencers” with millions of followers, in their regular posts they can only reach part of their audience, and often their “power” or “conversion” of hits and views are very low.
To reach many people, a recurrence will make a difference: the frequency with which new publications produced. The more posts created and the more they are shared, the more relevant they will be to search algorithms for indexed content on the internet.
The big challenge is increasing the recurrence of publications without losing quality; with time, preparing introductory content is much easier than conducting in-depth research on the subject. We can use this challenge to create a “conversion funnel” of more direct and shallow posts that lead people to more technical posts; we increase our recurrence without losing quality.
These were some of the points I learned, creating and observing other content in the Medium; I hope to produce many other posts with other tips in the future; what about you? What is missing for you to create content? I challenge you to post a month with something you’ve recently learned or mastered! :)
References:
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