Note: This post is targeted at people who haven’t started blogging yet. If you are new to blogging, you might want to check out my favorite blogging tips for beginners.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Google Plus shut down in 2019. After Orkut, it was the second time Google had shut down a failed social networking platform. We can’t blame Google for that, Facebook has already grabbed up most of the market share and almost every person using the internet would have used at least Facebook or one of their sister applications – WhatsApp and Instagram.
Nowadays, due to the boom in easy access to large sums of money from VCs, new social networking platforms are cropping up each day and many are shutting down due to the high cost of user acquisition. Keeping users coming back to their platform has been hard for companies even with the deepest of pockets. Just learn from Google’s mistake already. Duh!
That’s one of the main reasons to start blogging again.
By starting a blog, you needn’t worry about losing your content, exporting them, or migrating them. You can write whatever you want and you can have all the control over it – you own the content, design, and everything on your blog. You can update the content any time you want and no one can stop you from sharing your views. More than that, no one can sell your data.
Social media platforms are dying a slow death – losing their human touch which once made them popular during the good old days. Nowadays, it’s more about selling advertisements and getting companies to cough up more money to reach potential customers.
If the above reasons still don’t convince you to start blogging, continue reading as I try to explain why you must start a blog.
Do what you want
When you start blogging, you are not limited by the number of characters you can write (Twitter) nor do you need to worry about having to crop beautiful backgrounds from your pictures while sharing them online (Instagram). You can write and share whatever you want on your blog without any limitations. Moreover, you own the content.
You can have fun telling the world how your day was, share secret recipes that you learned from your grandmother, upload DIY videos, start a new business, etc. No one can stop you from expressing yourself, truly.
Meet new people
Once you start blogging and your content starts getting some attention, you will be able to meet like-minded people with whom you can interact online. You can learn a lot of new things from them, discover things that you have in common, and find a shared purpose or motivation to continue blogging.
You can even organize a meetup to meet them in person or organize a conference to spread the word and bring together more people who might be interested in what you’re doing. After all, blogging is very much like building a community, contributing to its shared success, and being a part of it.
Learn new skills
You can learn a lot of useful skills once you start blogging. I can attest to that. Personally, that is what got me interested in playing with WordPress in the first place. And that’s how I got into web design. Soon after that, I learned about search engines, how to improve your search engine ranking, what makes up for good content marketing strategy, digital marketing – and the different forms of it, analytics and how it can help you learn from your mistakes, etc.
All this knowledge gave me the confidence to land my first job right out of college. It is what set me on the right path to getting a good job just after completing my undergraduate degree while many of my classmates were still struggling to find their footing.
Without all the skills I learned from running a blog, I would have basically been stuck in someplace without any idea of the outside world.
Build a brand
If you ever dreamed of being a celebrity, now is your chance. Who doesn’t want to be popular among their peers? But, what if you could become popular worldwide! That’s possible with blogging.
There are many popular bloggers out there who have built their own brand by blogging. They have even made it their full-time business to blog. It pays for what they do every day, And, now you can too achieve that level. It’s a common playing field.
If you put in the effort to do proper research and publish high-quality but easy-to-understand articles online, you can easily rank higher on the search engine results page and get in thousands of views every day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re spending money on a flashy premium theme for your blog or where you host it, the quality of your content matters.
And with blogging, you can convert all your readers to your email subscribers or followers online and make some money promoting other brands as well.
Make money
Blogging does pay good money, trust me when I say it. Even though you might struggle in the first few years to make a decent amount, once you start getting in more traffic, you can monetize your blog to your heart’s wish. But hey, you do need to have a proper strategy in place to monetize your content.
The same form of monetization doesn’t work for all bloggers. Some bloggers find success in affiliate marketing, while others in advertisements. I have seen bloggers making a huge amount of money just by selling paid courses and eBooks on their websites.
You can even start a business by blogging. It can help you increase your readership, followers, and email list. You can either write for others, land a writing gig, or freelance for some side income. or become a full-time blogger. The options are endless.
Conclusion
I hope you could resonate with the above reasons on why you need to start blogging, especially when there are already hundreds if not thousands of social networking platforms out there.
If you’re ready to start blogging, you might want to start with WordPress.com (they take care of the technical part, you just need to write). But if you are ready to get your hands dirty, you can self-host your own WordPress blog.