Blogging requires an investment of time that can sometimes be difficult to justify. Here are some of the advantages to blogging that help me stay focused on maintaining it as my central presence on the social Web.
1. Ownership – You own your blog content for life when its address is a unique URL that your own. Those valuable links will follow you wherever you go.
2. Control – Unlike most social media networks, you have complete control over privacy settings, advertising, functionality, and the look and feel of your blog.
3. Flexibility – There is more functionality possible on a blog than most people will ever need. More important is you have the ability to adapt to other social web changes to maximize the effectiveness of your blog.
4. Multi-Media – You can host audio, video,and images on your blog instead of linking out to them.
5. Sharing – Your blog posts can be easily shared with friends, fans, and visitors that can extend your message and introduce you to new communities.
6. Community – A personalized blog becomes a community destination that you inhabit. It shapes your persona.
7. Expertise – When you blog on a regular basis you are forced to develop new perspectives that liberate your expertise. Here's one I had last week.
8. Email capture – You can capture email addresses on your blog to build your list. I use my eNewsletter for special content such as eBooks, and indeed there will be one ready on the near horizon. The sign-up is the green box in the center column.
9. Content Management – A search feature on your blog allows visitors to find what they need from hundreds of blog posts. This also helps you to link back to your previous work to further engage your reader. I can't imagine blogging without this.
10. Reputation Management – Google recently acknowledged blogs as respected sources of Web content by adding a search specific for them. A blog is a representation of your accumulated experience. It tells your story.
This barely scratches the surface, because it seems to overlook such powerful benefits as SEO. The truth is these ten advantages are sort of a foundation that make all of that other juicy stuff possible. Being findable is a by-product of creating great content and the reputation that goes with it.
For example, I receive my share of inquiries for speaking engagements from this blog. What makes that possible is the content that brings people where they may happen upon what is available on my speaking tab – videos of live presentations, my online speaking calendar, and more.
Regardless of your profession or type of small business, just 4 or 5 of these advantages ought to be enough motivation to at least give blogging a try.
Let me know if I can help. I'll be glad to to share what has worked for me.
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Until tomorrow, Jeff
These are some great points. I had forgotten about email capturing as an option for a blog’s advantages. I may have to look into some changes myself.
I would like to add a Webinar from White Horse that highlights how to make blogs and content management in general a bit easier.
Here is a link to download it: http://bit.ly/bSUF3q
Let me know if you have any questions as I do work for White Horse
I had trouble understanding this balance for yourself. Often I just used Twitter and Facebook, to push back my blog readers, but I wonder if it’s worth using these outlets to build their community tools, and not just use them to funnel back to my blog.