Writing a blog can be rewarding for its creative and meditative properties, and we believe that once you start, you’ll come to enjoy writing for yours. Of course, when it’s your career you’re looking at, it’s nice to have other, more career-focused motives. So what reasons will you have to blog? Take your pick:
1. Expert status. Having a blog helps you to become known as an authority in your field. As your audience and even your peers turn to you for your information, you’ll become known as a go-to person in your industry, and if you share and discuss industry news, you’ll further your position as a leader in your field.
2. Shareability. Blog posts are as easy to share as they are to read. By providing valuable posts to your audience and encouraging them to share through social media buttons, you can have your content seen by more people
3. Update-ability. The easiest way to persuade your audience to “come back” is to provide new content regularly on your website, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to consistently update your blog.
4. Content repurposing. Once you begin accumulating a large archive of blog posts, you’ll see the potential for repurposing those posts into other material. Perhaps you’ve written a four-part series on a particular topic. When it comes time to develop a course, that series will be an excellent starting point. Or if you’d like to try making a podcast, simply use each post as a script or starting point. You’ll find that your blog will grow into a rich archive of very useful material.
5. Low investment. Once your website is up and running, maintaining your blog is completely free. The only investment you’ll need to make is your time, and even then, using your new content creation strategies, writing the posts should be easy
6. Writing practice. Since you’ll be writing your book anyway, think of your blog as a writing warm-up or a practice. Blogs will get you into the habit of writing, as well as help you find your true writing voice. Try experimenting with different styles in your blog posts until you find one that feels comfortable to you
7. Subscriber generation. If your audience enjoys your blog posts, they may sign up to your mailing list to be notified of when new posts come out. Once they’re signed up, you can notify them of other content you have, turning them from blog readers into book readers.
8. Humanization. Many experts and personalities seem larger than life, especially when their audience only sees them through impersonal situations and doesn’t get a chance to interact or engage with them. By writing a blog in your own voice, you’ll not only be humanizing yourself to your audience but providing them with another way of engaging with your content through comments.
9. Content research. Blog analytics are easy to measure, especially when you have a platform such as WordPress that measures them for you. By using these analytics, you can discover which kinds of content are striking a chord with readers, and which aren’t working so well. If your posts about pies are receiving record views but your posts about cakes are all flops, it may be time to replace your upcoming book’s cake recipe section with a pie-centric one. If you treat your blog as a beta-testing station for your book, you can tailor your book to the content your audience wants most.
10. Keeping up. While it seems like everyone has a blog, this shouldn’t stop you from creating one. In fact, it should encourage you to get one; it would be ridiculous if a business refused to get a telephone because they saw it as a fad or because everyone else had one. Besides, you’ve already established that you have a unique value proposition that your audience will take value from, so there’s no need to get hung up on comparing yourself to other similar blogs that already exist or imagining that there’s no room for you among your competitors. The truth is, the internet is a vast and you have a right to occupy your place in it.
When you blog, you’re getting all of the above benefits and more, so you should never feel like you’re wasting your time when you write your posts. If you do still feel this way, you may want to reevaluate the reasons you’re writing your blog, or the way you’re writing it. If it feels like a burden, try shortening the posts, find subject matter you enjoy more, or loosen up your writing style. Ultimately, the goal is to maintain a sustainable platform, and in order to do this, you have to put your happiness and enjoyment first.
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