7 Reasons to Have a Personal Blog
Before starting your personal blog, give thought to why you want to blog. While experts like Chris Brogan, Brian Clark (aka Copyblogger) and BL Ochman (aka What’s Next) make it look easy, blogging takes hard work to craft posts and discipline to keep publishing on a regular basis.
To help you assess your options, here are seven reasons to have a personal blog.
- Write a personal journal to share your journey with a broader audience. This can be an old-fashioned diary format to express yourself or it can focus on a major event in your life to aid others.
- Support a cause to get wider reach. Is your goal to help expand public knowledge about a subject? This type of blog tends to be used by three major categories of bloggers: not-for-profit organizations which need cost effective ways to educate the public, political organizations which want to reach same minded citizens, and environmental groups which want to train the public to be more green.
- Develop a “How-to” blog. Communicate your knowledge to educate the public. Based on your training and experience, do you want to teach others about a targeted subject? You don’t need to be a traditional school marm or university prof to provide others with the benefits of your knowledge. Your subject matter can run the gamut from finance to fly-fishing.
- Share your interests with like-minded individuals. This type of blog covers a wide range of topics, often hobby related. Is your objective as a blogger is to connect with others who have similar pastimes? Among the major types of blogs that fall into this category are foodie blogs, fashion blogs, sports blogs, craft and hobby blogs.
- Communicate your spirituality. Depending on your background and/or interests, you may want to share your views with a wider public. This type of blog isn’t limited to one form of religion or beliefs. That said, the spiritual leaders of a religious group may find blogging useful to spread their message to a wider, less traditional audience.
- Provide support. Most notable of this type of blogs that help others are mommy and daddy blogs. (Please bear in mind that these bloggers aren’t just limited to new parents!) You can create this type of blog for a different type of audience such as marathon runners, sky divers or others.
- Make money blog. No personal list of blogging reasons would be complete without mentioning blogs to generate revenue. The reality is that most personal blogs are written for one of the other six reasons. Given the maturity of the blogging market, it can be difficult to break into the top ranks of most categories. Bloggers like Chris Brogan blogged for years before they became rock stars! While the top bloggers in most categories make revenue attributable to their blogs, the blog may be the vehicle that gets them noticed and the money comes from other sources. Further, once you stop putting in the same level of effort into your blog, others will take your place.
Before you start your blog, take some time to assess why you’re blogging and what your personal goals are for the blog.
Why do you blog? Is your reason on this list? If not, would you please add your reason in the comments below?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Here are some related readings to help you with your blog:
- 8 blog goals.
- 7 Points to Create Your Blog’s Personality
- 12 Suggestions to Overcome Blank Blog Post Syndrome
- How to Generate Blog Posts Without Really Trying
- 12 Ways to Grow Your Blog Audience – Flog Your Blog – Part 1 of 2
- 15 Ways to Expand Your Blog Audience – Flog Your Blog – Part 2 of 2
Photo credit: ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr
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