When blogging started, the first blogs were of glorified online journals, and in all likelihood, becoming a professional and famous blogger and making money online wasn’t an easy task. Since then, this blog-sphere has evolved, and now people blog for many different reasons. There are even niches among types of blogs – business, lifestyle, fashion, food, and entertainment blogs, among others.
While the blogging scene has greatly evolved over the last decade, the benefits of blogging are still plenty. Here’s a list of 10 reasons why people blog and how blogging can actually benefit their personal or professional life.
10 Reasons Why People Blog
1. Networking
Amazingly, blogging can actually help us to achieve several core networking strategies. Blogging networking is a great way to engage your people in your contact list, as well as reach a new audience. Below are six core networking strategies and how blogging can help us to accomplish each of them.
Blogging for Networking and Exposure
Some people just start a blog so they could expand their networking opportunities with their professional peers to establish their expertise and extend their online reach. Blogging gives them people a chance to expose their expertise and services to broader audiences, potentially leading to business and career opportunities.
For example, a middle-management employee at a large company will start a blog to demonstrate her knowledge and then use it as an opportunity to connect with peers outside of her company, such as executives or hiring managers. Such efforts may open doors for the new job opportunity, particularly when integrated with social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.
2. Offer Value
One of the core principles of substantial networking is to first make the effort to be helpful and add impart this value to your contacts before expecting anything in return. When your network gets so wide and stronger, you get stronger. Blogging is just a great way to deliver valuable content to your network. Writing the content that’s of utmost interest to your audience, such as “how-tos” or summarizing the research that you’ve conducted, is a great way to be helpful. For example, if you’re an expert in the sales field, you could share your knowledge of various sales strategies and tactics. If you’re an expert in the healthcare industry, you could share the research that you’ve conducted on the industry.
Some blogs are informative in nature, providing their visitors with a wealth of information or expertise on a given subject. An example would be a how-to blog which is focused on teaching people how to use the search engine optimization to increase website traffic. It doesn’t matter what topic the blogger is writing about so long as it provides value to readers interested in learning.
3. Hobbies
Blogging has become a global prodigy where people used to write articles on their blog and share it on their social channels and bookmarking sites. But many times we see that bloggers just fail to take their blog to the next level that is to make it even more successful. Thus many times we think about a push that is absolutely necessary to take the blogger to the next level. This driving force is known as “Passion”.
The starting phase of blogging is full of challenges, pressure, and hard work. We talked to many bloggers about their initial phase of the blogging career. All of them agree that the starting phase is the toughest phase of blogging. No one makes money soon by any present advertisement programs. Thus, Passion is the most important factor that helps people to move forward without thinking about money and other distracting factors.
Even the most grounded actors, musicians, professional athletes, and high-ranking officials are vulnerable to the deleterious effects of being in the media spotlight.
4. Money
If you’d like to generate some passive income streams from your blog, one of the best choices is the affiliate marketing that is recommending other services, digital products, and physical products of other companies in exchange for a commission.
Websites like Smart Blogger, make more than $100,000 per year promoting affiliate products, most of that is coming from casually recommending the products like Siteground and Ahrefs.
But there are lots of other examples too. For instance, The Digital Photography School has reportedly made over $500,000 in Amazon Associates commissions from promoting photography equipment
5. Advertising and Branding
Businesses function in an ever-changing landscape of technology and consumer demands.It is becoming increasingly important for all the small businesses to develop a presence and to network them across all channels to engage and communicate with their customers.
While creating a highly developed website, blogging plays a very important role in establishing a comprehensive internet marketing and branding strategy, the global economy’s dynamic nature requires all the businesses to go further. One of the most effective ways to build brand awareness, in order to provide relevant and useful content to your target audience is through consistent blogging.
Blogging is an inexpensive way for small businesses to drive traffic to their site, enhance inbound marketing efforts, and attract more prospective customers.
According to a recent inbound marketing report, nearly 80% of companies that use blogging as a part of their marketing strategy reported acquiring customers through their blogging efforts.
Additionally, 82% of businesses admit that blogging is critical to their business.
6. Connecting With Like-Minded Bloggers
After establishing a successful blog, blending in with the like-minded community will keep it up to date and relevant, also help it to mature with a constant stream of visitors and the income. Bloggers must learn networking skills to get to know the other players in the business and to get others to know them.
To become integrated with this community, however, Unfortunately, many bloggers become cave dwellers and seldom depart from the comfort zone of their own blogs and projects, rarely interacting with other people. If you are interested in networking with the community but do not know how to get started, then you have come to the right place.
7. To Create Awareness
Blogging is extremely useful for all the building and maintenance activities for your brand identity and brand awareness online. Incorporating a business blog in your marketing plan will be a source of instant exposure to your brand on various platforms especially with search and social media.
You could start by creating content interesting to your audience. Your blog articles should be about the things that are relevant to the services or products you offer. This way the consumer will understand you, will connect with you on a deeper level, will recognize your work, and seek it out from others. The idea is to create great content that is helpful by providing answers to the questions your targeted consumers are asking. By doing this you will begin to establish your business and brand authority.
It’s really important to engage with your consumers online, as increasingly, consumers are learning about services and products through social media and search. Your online marketing and brand strategy cannot rest on the logo and trademark alone. Regular blogging about relevant issues in your field will increase your visibility. Once someone relates to a blog you have written, it can go viral increasing your audience and potential consumers.
8. Self Promotion Or Build Your Personal Brand
Blogs let you show off your knowledge of your occupation, sector, or industry. You can share your insights there and update people on trends and events. It’s a bit like writing short articles for your own personal magazine, dedicated to topics you know and care about. In essence, you are setting yourself up as a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Doing so can make a strong impression on potential employers. Among the most popular free blogging platforms are Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. Here are some tips on how to begin providing useful content.
There’s a widespread misconception that a blog is merely an online publishing platform for endless advertisements. That each blog post is some sort of digital billboard web surfers happily soak up as they drift leisurely from site to site. That people like to seek out ads to expose themselves to.
Well, unless your blog post is being televised during a Superbowl commercial break, people probably aren’t eagerly looking for your ads. They don’t spend much time trying to find advertisements. They don’t spend much time studying them, either. And they don’t spend much time on websites that don’t offer them anything of value. Not when there are plenty of other sites that do.
Blogs are not for advertising. But that’s not to say they aren’t rewarding, nor is it to say they aren’t a self-promotional tool. When used well, a small business or personal brand’s blog provides lots of branding benefits, and it becomes a powerful platform for some subtle—and perhaps even the rare not-so-subtle—self-promotion.
Employers like to hire people who are well-informed and keen. That’s why you should consider adding a Blog to your social media presence.
9. Blogging as a Student Or Recent Grad
Are you shy about Blogging because you’re not even working in your chosen occupation yet? For students and recent grads, the goal is to show prospective employers how keen you are. You can accomplish this by doing the following:
- Write about things that relate to the career you’re hoping to get into
- Use excerpts from papers you’ve previously written for relevant courses
- Quote your professors and express your thoughts about what they’ve said
- Comment on interesting Tweets and Facebook posts you come across
- Mention the pro’s and con’s of the Blogging platform you’re using, so that others can one of the great things about a blog is the potential for it to reach far and wide. And, this is really great news for people and organizations who like to help others. If one small blog post goes viral or gets picked up by a larger news organization, it can change the entire course for that nonprofit or charity group. And, that’s an amazing thing.
I happen to think that no matter your blog niche and reach, you have a responsibility to dedicate part of your blog to help others. All of us have a cause or a charity that we are passionate about, one that we would love to help more. So, why not blog about it? It’s such a small thing when you think about it–you have a blog and you have space. Why not provide a portion of it for doing good? Some bloggers dedicate a post (or guest post) each week, while others find that doing it monthly or even just occasionally works best for their blog.
In case you aren’t aware, many non-profits (especially smaller organizations) struggle to meet the needs for their cause. The people who work there are overworked and underpaid (or, not paid at all) and most definitely understaffed. If you can take one small portion of that off of their shoulders by writing a blog post and spreading the word about their efforts, why wouldn’t you?
So helping others and feeling great about it is fantastic, but did you know that blogging for a cause can also increase your audience and even help present you with more opportunities?
10. To Express OneSelf
A blog is my own personal passion project and a direct reflection of my mind, heart, and soul. It represents me as a unique individual. That’s the cool part about blogging. Your blog can be focused on whatever topic you choose. You can blog about whatever is important to you, and you can use your blog to teach and/or inspire others! You’d be surprised how many people are out there that would love to hear what you have to say. I would love to learn about a particular topic that you happen to be an expert in.
My blog is my way to express myself and have fun while doing it. Designing a blog is also another amazing form of self-expression and is one of my favorite parts of blogging! You get to design an entire website that is uniquely you. Something that you can look at and say “yes, I did that.” I have a sense of pride when I look at my blog because I built it from the ground up. It’s definitely still a work in progress, but it’s awesome to see how much I’ve grown. I have so much fun creating content every week, and coming up with new creative ideas for my blog! It definitely keeps my creative juices flowing every day.
Conclusion
Some blogs are created to support a business or non-profit organization. Whether or not the blog actually promotes the products or services offered isn’t really the point. What matters is how the blog is tied to the market or industry it exists in, which helps raise brand awareness and extend the brand’s reach over the web. Business and charity blogs are fantastic tools to jump-start social media sharing and word-of-mouth marketing.
