In 1889, a 24-year-old Rudyard Kipling, flushed with his first success as a paid author, hung a sign outside his shabby London lodgings that read, “To publishers: Classics while you wait.”

If Kipling were alive today, he would probably write a blog –- or so I assume from an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “How Blogging Can Get You a New Job” by Sarah Needleman.

According to Ms. Needleman, blogging is a tango between recruiters and job seekers. Recruiters search blogs for prospective talent, and job seekers write their blogs to get noticed by recruiters.

Apparently, it works for both. A recruiter for Wal-Mart says in the article that he has filled 125 corporate jobs simply by devoting a couple of hours a week to scanning blogs. On the other side of the dance floor, a consultant for Internet companies in Oakland, California, says that he gets about 15 inquiries a month from companies and recruiters who found him through his blog.

While most blog-related recruits are professionals in technology and media, some are writers and PR generalists who use their blogs to showcase their communications skills.

That rather makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong. I mean, I’ve been blogging at least a couple of times a week for over a year and a half now, and I still haven’t been discovered yet. Why isn’t my phone ringing off the wall? Where are my lucrative freelance assignments and six-figure job offers?

Probably, my continued obscurity is my own fault. I’m not being as shamelessly self-promoting as I should be. If I want to pop up on Internet searches, I need to mention my own speechwriter credentials more often. I should be saying things like, “When I was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House…” or, “When I wrote speeches for Colin Powell…” or perhaps, “The last CEO for whom I wrote speeches served at chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the nation’s leading business associations. I wrote all his NAM speeches, too. Several of them were published in Vital Speeches of the Day.”

Then again, if this blog were just about me, who would read it?

I don’t want to bore my readers, but I do have to make a living. So, folks, if you find me saying things like, “In my 25 years of writing speeches for CEOs and cabinet-rank federal officials…” or, “On one of the five occasions when I was a featured speaker at the Ragan Speechwriters Conference in Washington…”, please don’t judge me too harshly for my blatant advertising. Bloggers need to eat, too.