Record deals. TV appearances. Consulting gigs. Cush jobs with mainstream media outlets.

It’s a trend that has come with the Web 2.0 territory: using blogs to leverage big career opportunities.

It's a tough market out there, but FOXBusiness.com is here to help. Careers is our "On Topic" subject for May, so check often for tips on everything from landing that dream job to how to recession-proof your job.

Look at Perez Hilton--the eponymous blogger who turned his celebrity Web site into a multimedia empire that now includes a clothing line and VH1 TV show.

It seems every day another blogger gets a book deal. Christian Lander, the former copy writer behind Stuff White People Like, (stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com) is turning out a tome for Random House in August. Mother-of-six Dawn Meehan’s blog chronicling her parenting adventures, Because I Said So, (mom2my6pack.blogspot.com) landed her a two-book deal with Guideposts.

After graduating from Princeton in 2004, 25-year-old Amit Chatwani was working in strategy consulting and living "with a bunch of Wall Street dudes." He had a blogger account and would casually post to it now and then. Then, bonus season struck.

“It was huge, and anybody I was talking to was like, ‘how much is your bonus gonna be?’ he recalls. "So I wrote this thing called ‘Bonus Season,’ about the effect of young finance guys’ bonuses on New York City. It was a tongue-in-cheek approach to that.”

The "Bonus Season" post was picked up by friends who put it on Instant Messenger and mass-forwarded it around the finance community. The blog, Leveraged Sellout (www.leveragedsellout.com), developed a core audience, and Chatwani found himself being written about in the international financial press. From this press attention came literary interest, and soon Chatwani found himself with an agent. They began shopping around a book deal.

Shortly after BusinessWeek profiled him in January 2007, anointing him "The Borat of Wall Street," he signed on with Hyperion. Now, Chatwani has a book due out this fall. (While he won’t discuss how much his Hyperion deal is worth, he will say that it’s "better than if I had actually been working in banking at my age.")

Career Value

As self-branding has emerged as a popular and viable method of boosting one's career, blogging has become a useful marketing tool.

Jason Alba, the CEO of career-management site JibberJobber.com, said building up an online portfolio through blogging establishes expertise and is one of the best forms of networking.

"A lot of people are looking for people to put in articles and are going to Google to seek experts and someone with knowledge on a subject,” he explains. "I’ve been approached for articles and speaking and partnerships, and they’re finding me through Google. They’re finding my personality and my depth because of my blog.”

On his blog is a monthly column called "You Get It," where he profiles a person who has successfully used the Web for career purposes. He points to Andy Shaindlin, the executive director of the Caltech Alumni Association, whom he featured in December.

“I don’t know of anybody else in the alumni space who blogs about alumni directors,” Alba said. “If you’re an alumni director and you need info, you’re going to look in Google and it’s most likely you’ll come up with his blog posts. He’s not necessarily any smarter than any of them – but he is the guy that’s branding himself in the alumni space through his blog. Just by virtue of the quality and content that he’s putting up, he’s the expert.”

He continues: “What would happen if Andy decides to change jobs? If he puts it on his blogs –‘it’s time for a change, my wife and I are looking in this area, does anyone know anyone in these places?’ – he’s already developed himself as an alumni expert. He has this following of people. What do you think would happen in his job search? That’s pretty powerful.”

The Crowded Landscape 

Alba brings up a point that many say is key in today’s crowded blogosphere: specialization. According to Technorati, a Web site that tracks blogs, there are over 178,000 new blogs sprouting on the Internet everyday. So how does one stand apart, much less make money?

As Clyde Bentley, an associate professor specializing in citizen journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, notes: the Amit Chatwani and Perez Hilton success stories are exceptions rather than the rule.

“Blogging is not a very lucrative business, because of those numbers,” Bentley said. 

“There are so many blogs out there that there is no one blog that can even come close to dominating a big share of business. Unlike a print or broadcast medium, anything on the Web competes with anything else on the Web. Here in Columbia [Missouri], we have maybe 20 print competitors. But my online spot is automatically competing with 80 million others. You have no geographic control over your niche, and that makes it difficult for advertisers because you’re trying to find out who you’re going to.”

He adds: “It’s like being at the soda fountain in Hollywood and then being discovered. There are those kind of stories – there are not a lot of them, but they do happen.:”

Specialization 

Jessica Coen is one example of a modern-day, Lana Turner-style blogging success story. While living in Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Michigan, she started writing a personal blog that, through what she calls "the economy of linking," got picked up by popular New York media blog Gawker.com. 

When Gawker’s editors found out that she would be moving to New York in 2004, they lured her away from grad school at Columbia University (her parents were ‘not pleased,’ she said, when they initially learned of this decision) and made her an editor at the site, which is read by plenty of higher-ups in the media world.

“I lucked out, I really did," Coen said as she recounts her career trajectory. The exposure from editing at Gawker helped land her gigs at Vanity Fair and then New York magazine, where she now serves as deputy online editor.

“My advice would be to have a very strong voice, stick with it, and have a very specific beat or topic,” she said. “The blogosphere is so huge now, and everything is becoming more and more specified and specialized in a way. You should be taking internships, but at the same time --while you’re doing that, start a blog. Start writing. Any opportunity you have to self-publish and get your writing out there on your own, you should.”