Why Should I Start A Blog?

Blogging can be one of the most rewarding activities to perform online. Whether you’re considering starting a blog for business or for personal enjoyment, you may well be asking yourself ‘Why should I start a blog?’.

It’s a question asked commonly, and there are plenty of reasons why starting a blog is a great step to take.  Here are five reasons to start a blog, in no particular order:

• Build contacts and network with people
  As you begin to blog regularly, you’ll start to build up a following of people who read your blog and possibly even engage with it through comments, emails or social media. If you’re blogging for personal reasons about, for example, your hobby or a subject that you’re interested in, then interacting with these people is going to be a positive experience as you meet like-minded users with similar interests.  It may also improve your knowledge of a subject, and provide motivation for you to continue blogging.From a business perspective, building up this rapport with users could be vital to your business.  Your readers could potentially become sales leads or advocates of your company, all the while helping to grow your social media presence and spread the word.
• Become an authority or expert on a specific subject
  The more you blog about a certain subject and the more that your content is shared by your audience, the more you will be looked upon as an expert in your chosen field. This can open up many opportunities to yourself personally or your business, opportunities that would have been unrealistic without a successful blog.Furthermore, if you start a blog and regularly write great content, search engines will begin to give greater authority to your domain which is priceless for SEO.  Having good quality, regularly updated content in a blog format is generally excellent for SEO also.
• Inspiration
  Starting a blog is a great way of becoming inspired, and inspiring others. Once you are regularly blogging, you will begin to find yourself looking for new angles on your subject matter, researching new things to report to your audience and generally striving to produce better content each day.By starting a blog, you are also likely to begin inspiring others with your content.  Talking and meeting with the people who are reading your content, you will soon find that some will have taken inspiration from it and may begin blogging themselves, or looking in to a certain topic or methodology you have raised in your blog.  Starting a blog is a very creative process, and it reaps rewards for more than just yourself.
• Learn new skills
  It’s highly likely that at least some people reading this will not have all of the skills required to start a blog. And that’s another beauty of blogging in today’s internet-driven world.  Starting a blog is easy, and free.  There are plenty of online tutorials and resources to help you get setup with a great looking blog in no time.As your blog progresses, you will find yourself learning new things. This could simply be writing in a new style, but more than likely you will learn about websites, imagery, copyright and plenty of other skills you may never have had the opportunity or inclination to learn otherwise.
• Earn money from your blog
  We’ve all heard of the stories of bloggers who start a blog and are earning a five-figure revenue inside 12 months? Well, that may not be realistic, but as your blog grows there will be the potential to earn at least a little revenue.  For businesses, this may purely be from sales leads, but personally you could place adverts on your blog.  You may only make £10 a year, but you’d still be making money from a hobby.

As your blog grows, opportunities may arise which would allow you to increase revenue.  Product reviews, competitions and targeted advertising campaigns may all find their way to you should your blog become popular and authoritative enough.