1. 30-seconds in blogging is all it takes, to post that is. Like the author says: “It’s not what you say but how you present it.” So true.
2. What is the difference between an essay and a blog post? Well, it ain’t thirty seconds, ducky!
3. And I quote: “A recruiter is a consultant…To get in bed with your client put on your consultative head.” Whatever happened to nurses in suspenders?

As part of my illustration that the disconnect can be reconciled with relatively little effort we jumped online to look at ways I had addressed this problem in the past. We looked at my Quote for the Day, On the Radar, Recruiting by Numbers and other experiments, managing to cover everything from SEO blah-blah-blah to reputation yada-yada-yada in the space of about 20 minutes.

I’m sure the conversation would have been more fruitful had many of  my illustrations not been frustrated by a series of recently vandalized pages, courtsey of Jobster. Clicking through a series of blank pages is hardly a good first step in getting a reticent client to part with more money, is it?

Ho-hum…

I was watching the telly the other day, something to do with the continuity between China’s ancient history and its modernity evidenced in the spectacles of the Beijing Olympics.  A curator at some Chinese museum was profiled painstaking repairing a terracotta soldier that had seen better days since his exquisite creation not that long after God started his own work in clay.

As he pieced tiny fragments together to reconstruct this noble warrior’s shattered chin — noting it would take at least a year to fix just one of the thousands of these unique figures that needed attention — the curator said he continues to soldier on for the love of his work.  Clearly, in the overall scheme of things his product will have little impact on the course of humanity. But the the type of devotion manifest in labors of love might, don’t you think?

I think I shall attempt to reconstruct some of my fragmented efforts at optimization by consolidating past posts and new ones on my BROWN BAG RECRUITER site.  I believe this is a good way to preserve something that had value at the time it was conceived and which may serve a useful purpose moving forward.

I know some people will bellyache about content regurgitation but I don’t care. I say, if nothing else, labors of love are good for the soul. That was reaffirmed for me the other day looking at the wry smile on a once shattered soldiers face.

I remember many years ago when subliminal advertising was being used for the first time, at least that we knew of, there was a hullabaloo about it in the U.K. when I was growing up. The concern was this Kremlin-inspired technique was nothing more than a cynical attempt to take over the minds of Coronation Street’s already gullible audience. Right, as if.

Around the same time there was a stink because James Bond [himself!] was kowtowing to big business buying into their latest subliminal ploy, product placement. James Bond as our poster boy for fast cars and hard liquor was consistent with the image of the cold-war lady-killer but pushing product? No, no — it was un-British.

I guess at some point someone should have pointed out that any form of advertising that works below our normal levels of consciousness runs the risk of being viewed by the unwitting as suspect. It hardly matters if the message comes and goes in the blink of an eye or is unobtrusive in other ways, the intent is the same — to influence the subject’s behavior whether they become aware of it or not. Outrageous, huh? The lengths we’ll go to…I mean, really!

Anyway, somewhere between the idea of being able to control feeble minds and getting blotto in the back of a Bentley I made the juvenile decision to enter into the glamorous world of advertising. It was either that or become an MI6 operative, working undercover.

Ahem…

Sharing stories about my life has little use without some context. I am neither famous or interesting nor ever likely to be the object of some biographer’s research. When it comes to documenting my unremarkable life, it is only natural then for me to assume that nobody cares very much about what I might be bloggin’ about, my underlying purpose. Well, other than Mother of course.

Intending my posts to be enough without having to click on a link to get the meaning of it all, if you do go there I hope to share something else that can only be achieved through the portal a link provides. At the very least, I hope if you do follow a link or two you might find a morsel you’ll enjoy enough to overlook my possible self-indulgence in putting it there in the first place, the weakest link.

Contrasting my possible overuse of links with a more deliberate tack, let’s consider their use on blogs where the business of blogging is business, the intended “reader” a machine, not you — the context commercial.

Whether it is linkbaiting, backlinking, backbiting or something else, the strategic use of links for [ultimately] driving traffic is a quite different from my humble sprinkling of breadcrumbs — yes, the Hansel and Gretel variety, Birdbrain! — should one link too many take us up the garden path, lost and unable to find our way back home.

Confused by the likes of Joel Cheesman and other SEO pundits, my pathetically clumsy efforts at improving my googliciousness fell short of expectations. And from there it was a downhill slide I can tell you! It wasn’t long before I all but abandoned my experiments — cross-posting, using keywords, driving my friends crackers, digesting and putzing around on Recruiting.com — realizing that one rarely gets to have their cake and eat it, whatever that nonsensical phrase means.

Instead my daily postings now serve some other purpose, or so I hope. But no, not now…that’s another post [-mortem?] for another time.

Prvious posts in the series:

• Google Juice
• Ripping Yarns
• Recursion Excursion
• The Man in the Know
• The Hungry Blogger

Mon asks a recurring question on my Hungry Blogger post:

I am wondering whether blogging makes a noticeable difference to your SEO. I have been blogging for my company for a few weeks and have no idea whether i am causing any real differences. Are we appearing higher up in google? No idea, but am having a bit of fun while i am doing it at least.

There is plenty of stuff online that will help you understand how to make the most of your blogging, get some Google juice.

Here are a couple of resources you will find helpful, sites you might want bookmark if Google itself isn’t good enough:

• Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO on Problogger
• Blogs and Search Engine Optimization on About.com
• Top 25 SEO Blogs on DailyBlogTips [read through their SEO category, follow your nose]
  

You should look up Michael Specht — he is an Australian blogger like you, closer to home if you want to try and make a human connection. I don’t know what platform you are using but here are Michael’s earlier experiences trying to get some lift off a WordPress platform.

Have you considered joining a community like RecruitingBlogs.com where asking these types of question will get you a more varied response? If not, you should.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…I could have answered Mon in the post’s comments but I need the juice, you know, to gargle with!