Some people will tell you that blogging is dead. As it turns out, some of those same people said exactly the same thing several years ago and yet we’re still here and blogging is just as relevant and arguably even more powerful than ever before. Social media, especially in video format, is certainly a very big deal, but that doesn’t mean that blogging doesn’t still have its place among your online repertoire.
Blogging can be remarkably useful, boosting your SEO, driving more traffic to your site, and helping to establish your expertise in your industry. But there are several more benefits that may have forgotten about too.
1. Networking with Everyone
Your blog not only provides a very stable home for you on the Internet, one that isn’t at the mercy of someone else’s algorithms, but it also gives you a tremendous opportunity to connect with all sorts of individuals.
It enables you to connect with brands both within and from outside of your niche, unlocking tremendous opportunities for sponsored campaigns and native content. It enables you to connect with your fellow bloggers and influencers, leveraging one another’s knowledge and experience for mutual benefit. It enables to you connect with your fans, followers, customers and colleagues, giving a direct channel where you can receive instant feedback.
Making money online can feel like an awfully lonely experience, but it doesn’t have to be.
2. Forming a Habit
One of the great benefits of the dot com lifestyle is that no one is that no one can tell you when and where you work or what you work on. On the flip side, this means that you need a tremendous amount of discipline to avoid the pitfalls of endless distraction and ceaseless procrastination.
Committing yourself to a strict blogging schedule helps to develop the kind of work ethic and discipline that you need to succeed as an online entrepreneur. It forces you to form a positive habit and this will serve you well in all the other tasks you need to do.
3. Developing Technical Skills
It’s true that you can outsource practically anything on the Internet. You don’t need to know how to design a blog theme, because you can just buy one or hire someone else to do it for you. You don’t need to know how to install, activate and configure a plugin, because you can just get someone else to do it.
At the same time, the very nature of blogging is such that you’ll start to learn some of these technical skills if only through osmosis alone. You’ll learn how to edit images effectively. You’ll learn some basic HTML and CSS code. All of these kinds of technical skills, even if you only remain at a novice level, will serve you well, no matter what you choose to pursue online.
4. Thinking Things Through
There’s something naturally miraculous about the simple process of writing things down. Some people choose to do this by maintaining a personal journal or diary. On some level, your blog can take on part of this role too.
You might start with any inkling of an idea, but through the very process of having to write and format your blog post, you are forced to develop and refine that idea into something more clearly defined, something more useful. You may gain insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise and these can help to further improve your chances at success.
5. Working When You’re Not
It’s not technically true that blogging is a great source of passive income. That’s because if you want your blog to succeed over the long term, you need to keep up with your posting schedule and continue to engage with your audience with new content.
However, all of the content in your archive will continue to work for you for years to come, especially any content that is more evergreen in nature. Speaking for myself, I have at least a few resource-type posts that continue to drive considerable traffic to my blog, oftentimes even more than my newer posts. Even if I never touch them again, they’re still attracting traffic, they’re still earning revenue, and they’re still helping me grow my audience.
6. Owning Your Identity
Reputation management can be a very tricky business, especially when your name is your brand. Anyone on the Internet can write about you. If that content is negative in nature, this can significantly harm how future prospects may view you, shrinking your opportunities to succeed.
When you have your own blog and you point your social profiles toward it, you increase the chances of “owning” the search engine results page for your name (or the name of your brand). What you write about yourself will be front and center, rather than the rant-filled drivel that someone else might be writing.
Do you still blog? What have you found to be most beneficial?