5 Reasons to Keep Blogging besides Money?

5 Reasons to Keep Blogging besides Money?

Blogging is a business idea that excites a lot of people. You don't need a lot of money to get started, publishing a blog post requires almost no technical skill and the income potential for a really successful blog can reach 7 figures and beyond. You don't have to worry about the hassles of shipping physical products or the financial burden of renting a brick and mortar location. It just seems like such an easy way to make money online. At least until you actually try it… A study done by Technorati revealed that out of 133 million blogs tracked, only 7.4 million were updated within the past 120 days. That means that 95% of blogs ultimately get abandoned. One of the most important things you need to do to succeed at blogging is to be consistent and stick with it for the long-term. But sometimes it can be tough in the early days when you aren't getting much traffic or making any money. Through the years, I've realized that there are other really good reasons to blog besides money. In this article, I want to share 5 reasons to keep blogging besides money to keep you motivated during those tough early days. 1. It Improves Your Writing and Communication Skills Writing and communication skills are going to be useful in everything that you do, even if you decide to start another business besides blogging. To win with blogging, you'll have to do a lot of writing. And just like anything else you do in life, you'll get better the more you practice. If you really want to become a top-notch writer, try guest blogging for popular blogs. Some blog editors aren't very picky if your ideas are interesting, but you'll find that other editors are more particular about how they want their guest posts written. I've learned a lot by working with other editors when guest blogging and the best part is that it was free. Authors and other professional writers usually have to hire editors to edit their work, but if you guest post for popular blogs, you'll get to hone your writing skills for free. Writing for other blogs will make you a more adaptable writer. You'll pick up writing tips and ideas from other editors and they'll help you identify weak points in your writing. You'll also have to pitch ideas to editors to get your guest post published in the first place, which will help you improve your persuasive writing skills. Being able to persuade editors to pick your content over ideas from other writers can be useful if you decide to start a freelance writing career or apply to a competitive work at home job. 2. It Helps You Get Organized Another benefit of blogging is it helps you organize resources and get organized in general. Sometimes I create lists of resources or tools and publish them as blog posts. For example, I create a list of webinar tools because I was researching tools for hosting webinars at the time. I didn't end up doing a webinar, but if I ever decide I need to do one in the future, I can just go to that resource and find a tool that I like. I also sometimes create persuasive articles about marketing topics. For example, I wrote an article about why short-form content might actually outperform long-form content if it is created and promoted correctly. In my article, I referenced a lot of statistics and data to make a good case for short-form content. If I ever mention short-form content in future articles or need to persuade a client to use short content, I can go back to my article and grab that data. I actually wrote a big content strategy guide on my blog because a few clients I talked to didn't seem to have a good content strategy or they were doing something that wasn't ideal for blogging. If I talk to similar prospects in the future, I can just send them a link to my guide or I can read it again to refresh my memory on content strategy. You also need to be very organized with blogging. You have to plan out what you're going to write, how you are going to promote your blog when you are going to spend time on social media and lots of other things. Being able to manage and organize your blogging activities is a useful skill that can translate into any other work that you do. 3. Teaching Improves Your Mastery Of The Topic Another awesome benefit of blogging is that teaching improves your mastery of the topic that you are writing about, especially if you have to do research on the topic. Gary Halbert was one of the most well-known copywriters of his time and one tip that he gave for becoming a great copywriter was to get copies of other really well-written pieces and write them out by hand, word for word. When you write, you access areas of your brain that allow you to remember things better. When you teach something to someone else, you have to really think about and go into the details. You also have to organize your ideas into a coherent flow that other people can easily follow. Other bloggers might also comment on your article and ask questions. For example, I shared my article about short-form content with another blogger and she mentioned that short content seemed good for social sharing, but not for SEO. I used SEMRush to dig up some SEO data on blogs that were using short content and sure enough, they had lots of backlinks and were getting tons of free organic SEO traffic. I added the data to my article, so now if someone questions the SEO benefits of short content, I have the knowledge to address it. If I had never written about the topic and received feedback from readers, I might not have ever thought about the SEO issue. One other great side effect is that as you write more articles, it also improves your confidence, especially if your blog starts getting more comments and social shares. 4. Allows You to Build Critical Relationships That Can Help You Succeed One benefit of blogging that I never thought about was the ability to build relationships with other people in my niche, including well-known influencers like Neil Patel. Those relationships are really beneficial and great for credibility. It's hard to quantify how important relationships are and a lot of people don't focus on them because we don't see “data-driven studies” on how effective they are. But most influencers are smart about building relationships and when I did my very first expert roundup about how to promote your blog, 6 out of 40 influencers said to focus on building relationships, making it the most popular tip on my roundup. Relationships are really important in business. For example, I use to think that most businesses found employees through job postings, but an estimated 41% of hires come from referrals. If you freelance, then you might have received some of your clients from referrals and those clients were probably easier to sell to because they trusted the person that referred you. So even if blogging isn't your main focus, being able to build relationships is an amazing benefit that makes it worth doing. 5. It Improves Your Creativity Finally, blogging really improves your creativity. To really do well with blogging, you have to think about how to stand out from other bloggers. Blogging forces you to get creative and if you stick with it, your creativity will improve over time. To continue to blog, you'll have to figure out how to come up with ideas on a regular basis. You'll have to challenge yourself to think of great content ideas for your readers. You'll also have to think about how to create content that stands out from all the other content out there so that people will pay attention to you. Psychology studies show that creativity helps us solve problems, adapt to new situations and gain confidence in ourselves. It also makes us more interesting to other people. To Sum It Up… Hopefully, these reasons to blog will help you stay motivated when you feel like quitting because even without the money, blogging has lots of other worthwhile benefits. Remember also that blogging is an activity that scales a lot more if you stick with it for the long-term. You'll get better at it the more you write and the ones that stick to it are the ones that will reap the rewards. Brian Lang is the founder of Small Business Ideas Blog and Web Developers Etc, which offers website, hosting and graphic design services. Visit the Web Developers Etc blog for more articles and ideas on business and marketing.