Day 70 - Excellent Written Communications Skills Only Get You So Far

          I applied to 5 jobs today through Indeed, although all of them were on CareerBuilder.com. CareerBuilder seems to have the most and the best listings. I joined a pay site called The Ladders that specializes in jobs that pay over $100,000 per year. It cost $30 to get a basic membership that gives me access to their jobs and the content of the articles they put up. They are great at promoting themselves. That is to say that they are really good at making themselves sound really good which is why I parted with the thirty bucks. Now we’ll see if they can actually deliver. Like all the rest of the sites they allow you to search their postings by job title, key word, and geographical location. I still want to stay in Florida so I turned that filter on. I wouldn’t mind going back to Arkansas, but anywhere else I’d just be biding my time until I could get back to Florida. It’s expensive and hot, but it suits me somehow. Besides I have a lot of family in Florida including my children and grandchildren. Living here just cuts down on the travel required at holidays and family gatherings.

          I check my Triond account about every hour. So far 2 people have read my article. It’s nice to know that someone did, but since it only pays a penny for every 7-10 people who click through I’m certainly not going to be buying an Aston Martin with the proceeds. The trick of course is to have a lot of articles up. It’s best if they’re all related and on a topic that you have some expertise in and credentials for that’s also of general interest to a lot of people. Even then you have to work at driving traffic to the articles through the judicious and creative use of blogs and social networking sites. This may be harder than it looks. I’ll have to post some more articles on different topics and see what people are actually interested in reading.

Digitally disadvantaged as I am I realize that I’m going to have to amp up my online presence if I’m going to get anything cooking with writing. I’m going join FaceBook and create a blog. I’m already on LinkedIn, but that’s a network for professional connections. It’s supposed to be useful for getting a job, but I’m not seeing anyone beating my doors down just yet to offer me a cushy position. Like anything else on line it requires constant attention and tweaking until you’ve reached a critical mass of contacts. It also requires a combination of constant activity on the message boards, publishing, and cross-linking all your activities to establish some kind of professional credibility.

There is one other problem with all this digital networking. I have to keep my writing activities segregated from my accounting activities. The silly poem I put up yesterday on Triond is fairly innocuous, but my other writings—I have a number of short stories and a novel in progress—tend to be a little more outré shall we say, a little more earthy. Now I’m not talking about anything offensive, but it is different from what most business managers would expect of their accountants. The novel for instance features what is generally known as a gentlemen’s club and several exotic dancers, a crime boss, a priest having a crisis of faith, and a ponzi-scheme operator. What board of directors would care to have their financial matters in the hands of an accountant who knows enough about such things to make a compelling story out of them when they are able to choose from among a slew of candidates who have not a creative bone in their body? No, no one on LinkedIn must ever be able to connect the dots to anything I might write and post on line—at least not until I get something published and start banking fat royalty checks.