In high school, I met a girl who blogged. She blogged about baking and paired recipes with beautiful anecdotes from her personal life, weaving the two together in a mesmerizing way. She was a normal high school teenager, but she turned her passion into a project, and that project turned out to be very successful.
I have always loved writing, but as a teenager, I lacked an outlet to share my words. Inspired by my schoolmate, I went home and started a blog of my own. That was seven years ago, and I’m still blogging today.
That first blog, and all subsequent blogs, were never meant to be anything more than a hobby. I had never set my sights on becoming a professional blogger; it was just a platform for me to explore new interests and share ideas with others. My blog grew naturally over time, but that was never in the forefront of my mind. I write because I love it, and I blog because it’s a great medium.
In my senior year of college, I started to search for ways to build up my writing portfolio. I added my personal blogging experience to my resume and began to look for sites that I could write for. That’s when I started contributing to Looksharp.
Several months later, I graduated from college and was looking for work in writing. I interviewed at a few companies and was told repeatedly that my resume stood out because of my blogging experience. They wanted to know what I wrote about, how long I had been blogging and what I had learned from doing it. Over seven years of hobby blogging, I had picked up a lot of practical knowledge and skills. Ultimately, I landed my first two jobs out of college not because of my degree, but because of my blogging experience.
Having a cultivated hobby became the most valuable item on my resume. Understanding the blogging community, how to operate on multiple blogging platforms and the basics of search engine optimization became practical skills that set my resume apart from the crowd, at least enough to get my foot in the door. Although I didn’t know it when I started my first blog in high school, the thing that I was doing ‘just for fun’ would become an important factor in the start of my career.
