Why you should blog

Every blogger has to answer the question “Why are you bothering?”, even if it’s from exasperated co-workers! In an effort to perhaps encourage others, here’s why I bother…

One of the major benefits is slightly counter-intuitive – it forces you to be reflective. Doesn’t matter if there’s no audience, just sitting down and writing something regularly changes your thought processes, crystallizes half-formed ideas, causes you to reflect etc.

The second benefit is it initiates a conversation, both online and in person. I read a lot – again, some might say too much. But that breadth of reading is a huge open window bringing fresh intellectual air into my company, and blogging ensures we both participate and benefit from that.

I’m me, and I know others are different. I have a particular role in my company, we’re in a specific industry with a certain commercial stance. I’m lucky that I can skim through 1,000 incoming items every day and find the interesting stuff, blogging or forwarding internally as needed. I’m also a person who needs to either bounce ideas off someone or have to write something before and idea crystallizes. I’m also lucky that I have a lot of autonomy in terms of how I do my job and contribute to the success of my company.

However even if you aren’t exactly like me, you’d find something in Blogging – both personally, and professionally. Here’s an excellent 1.5 minute segment by Seth Godin and Tom Peters on why you should blog, I was quite surprised by the strength of Tom Peters’s comments on the positive nature of blogging on his professional life:

My only problem with blogging so far is that I often have ideas about what to blog when I’m interacting with prospects, customers, partners etc. But it would feel wrong to blog those thoughts straight away – it just doesn’t feel respectful. My current approach is to make a note of it, wait until I’ve got several anecdotes which support the same overall concept, and then blog on it a month or so later.