Over the weekend a friend asked me why I blog and I thought to myself: what an excellent idea for a blog post. I’d like to make my motivations for blogging transparent so read on and find out why blogging has become as much a part of my life as regular exercise.
1) To Build Trust.
If you are working in the cloud, some of your co-workers, business partners or customers will never meet you. Most of these will still Google you before doing business with you – it’s a natural and understandable instinct. If someone Googles your name and finds nothings, or very little then you are an unknown quantity. If instead they find a blog, with hundreds of articles you have a personality. You have interests and a voice. People can get to know you through your writing, and can dig as deep as they like by looking through your archives. With my blog I hope that my current and future readers will become acquainted with my values, and from that infer information about my companies’ products.
I wear suits and I blog. Therefore I am trustworthy.
2) To Get Feedback on Ideas
The best way to develop an idea is through dialogue. Read through Plato’s Socratic Dialogues before you try to argue otherwise. When I blog, I have an audience of readers who think about what I say, then either comment, email or talk to me in person about the ideas. An added bonsus is that my readers learn about my interests and so bring them up with me when they see me in person, with such exchanges helping me develop my ideas further. My most valued readers will even tell me when I get something wrong – saving me from embarrassment or worse yet, from making a poor decision.
3) To Crystallize Thoughts
In an ideal world you would take half an hour aside everyday to think ideas through. We don’t live in an ideal world, and the truth is that the best way I know to think something through is to write about it. Mistakes in your logic become glaring as you type and the added knowledge that what you write will be read and judged by your readers ensures you keep strict quality controls . When I write, I don’t really have a clue what my conclusion will be until I’m nearly finished. I don’t write in chronological order either. I jot down ideas across the page, throw in various TO-DOs, then play around with the structure and content until it makes enough sense for me to hit “Publish.” The point is to get a reasonably firm conclusion about some topic out of my time spent writing – a new idea I can hopefully apply in the coming weeks.
4) Ego
Right know there are nearly 200 people who have read every single one of my posts. Some of my posts have 2000 readers. Not only that, but they spend a significant amount of time reading these posts. According to Google Analytics, my average reader spends 2:30 on each page. That’s huge. I feel flattered that in the age of the 10 second attention span so many people are willing to wait around to hear what I have to say, then come back for more the next day. It feels good.
5) To Demonstrate Knowledge
I studied law at University, yet I work with computers for a living. Someone might ask, rightly, how I can prove I have any expertise with the Internet since I have no qualifications in the area. My blog provides an answer to this – it lets people know I have thought a lot about what I am doing, and that I know the lingo and the ins and outs of my domain.
6) To Sharpen my Writing Skills
The secret to getting good at writing is to do a lot of it. Surprise surprise. That’s the secret to being good at anything – anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. By writing regularly I improve my style and, since I hope to write a book in the distant future, I’ll take all the practice I can get.
Hopefully you can now see why I blog and perhaps get inspired to start blogging too.
