Do you like to express your opinions and discuss them with others? Do you have thoughts and ideas that deserve to be shared with the world? If so, it’s time to ask yourself “why haven’t I started blogging yet?” For you, blogging is the best thing to happen since the Internet began. Blogging existed before social networks – and the rise of social networking has only served to amplify the impact of the blogging community.
When it comes to blogging, it’s easy to get mired in the details. Language, frequency of writing, whether you will attract readership or not, etc. are all part of the maze that confuses people about blogging. Blogging is not about having the language skills to win the Pulitzer Prize or having an audience of 100,000 from day one. Blogging is simply about sharing your ideas with the world.
Even professionals – engineers, managers, lawyers, doctors – can benefit from blogging. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that blogging can play an important and crucial role in their career. True, blogging takes time away from a busy schedule, but so does anything that begins with an aim to have a positive result. Like all good things that happen, it takes time and effort.
From my personal experience, I’d like to share the following reasons I think professionals should be serious about blogging.
1. Blogging Improves Your Knowledge of Your Field
Blogging is about explaining your ideas, showcasing your knowledge and sharing your opinion. In the process of doing so, you need to refer to many sources to support your opinions. Doing so not only increases your knowledge about the subject, but also gives you insight into different perspectives on the topic.
2. Blogging Improves Your Communication Skills
Many professionals refrain from blogging under the pretext that their personal writing style isn’t suitable or that their language skills are inadequate. In writing, as with other activities, one gets better by practice. Though good style is important, blogging isn’t as much about that as it is about conveying your idea.
As you work on articulating your thoughts into words, you’ll find that the process helps align your thoughts better and improves your ability to express yourself. You’ll be able to concisely formulate undefined thoughts into proper phrases.
3. Blogging Establishes You as a Thought Leader
Ever notice something in common about the thought leaders in various industries? They have been identified in that position by the opinions and ideas that they have shared with the world. They have become the “go-to” person whenever anyone seeks an important opinion regarding their industry.
Bloggers are in a similar situation. As you keep blogging and sharing your ideas, eventually you can become a “go-to” person in your areas of expertise. The initial readership of your blog might be small, but over a period of time if you keep at it, your community of followers will grow and so will your value in the industry.
4. Blogging Can Help You with Your Career
One you have established yourself as a thought leader, you never know what opportunities might knock on your door. It might be in the form of a new job, investor, clients, publishers or someone else entirely. Blogging certainly acts as a career booster.
Let me assist with a personal example. Way back in my 6th semester of engineering, I started with a design blog. Whatever designs I learned from tutorials I would post in it.
By the time I completed my engineering, I had received a good number of freelance works in referral from my design blog. Today, the same continues with my business blog.
5. Blogging Helps Build Powerful Connections
If you’ve been using internet for quite some time, you’ll know the role bloggers play. Many of the most-visited websites in the world are blogs, run by either a single person or a group of bloggers. Just like IEEE is there for engineers, there are various formal and informal groups of bloggers across the globe.
If you are contributing valuable insights relative to your field, there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to build contacts with some of the big time bloggers and players in your industry. This is a much better option than flying around the world and sharing your business card.
6. Blogging Builds Your Personal Brand
To distill the above points above into a single one – blogging immensely helps build your personal brand. Most professionals work hard because they want to be successful and well-known in their field. Blogging aids that by making small celebrities out of regular professionals. It establishes you as an influencer.
7. Blogging Is Good For Self Evaluation
Self-evaluation (not from a philosophical point of view) is an important and rewarding activity for professionals. There arises a need to evaluate where you stand in the industry after a certain period of time, relative to your peers. Once you start blogging regularly, after some time look back at the posts you wrote in the early days. Has your writing style evolved? Are you analyzing topics more deeply? Has your work experience moulded your writing abilities from a more practical aspect?
These are the questions you’ll be able to answer, which will eventually help you analyze your progress.
If you’re still in doubt, I’d recommend you simply try it. Just DO IT! Everyone feels weird writing their first blog post – and their second, third, and fourth too. But eventually, once you start realizing the authenticity blogging brings, you’ll be amazed at how empowering blogging can be.
Article contributed by Vijay S. Paul, IEEE member and blogger at http://vijayspaul.com.