Why you should start blogging?

“Isn’t 2020 too late to start blogging?”

“But I suck аt writing”

“But I am a/an *insert profession/title, not a writer”

These are all excuses that you (myself as well) most likely have used to get out of blogging. I have some good news for you, it is not too late and in this post, I will go over the whys and benefits of starting your own blog in 2020.

The need for online presence

If you have a business whether online or not by now you know how vital is to have a presence online to draw in customers. You’ve set down and watched countless hours of “Just do it” videos from people like Garry V and other media Gurus and how to utilize to the max all the social media platforms. So you sat down and created a Facebook page, Instagram profile, Youtube channel, Snapchat account, Tik-Tok, and whatever else you could find that is “hot” right now, just with the idea that this will bring you in more customers, but then the harsh reality hit you…

Limitations

• Monetized vs non-monetized platforms

After creating soo many profiles, you start understanding that it is a lot of work to maintain all of them, so the first choice you need to make to have some room to actually do what you do and not just manage social media profiles is to go with what’s new and hot, but there is no monetization or go with the old-but-gold platforms where you can even make some additional money (someday, eventually, maybe…), at the end of the day you have a business so the hours you put into something need to be carefully calculated, so you can still make a living and keep your sanity.

• Platform format

The second choice you are faced with is going to be on what kind of platform will you focus on, an image-oriented one (most of them are slowly changing to the second type), hybrid ones (image and video), or strictly video. Whichever you chose, you would most likely want to re-use the content for platforms in the same category, but then you find out that all of these platforms have a different content format (e.g. video on Youtube is in landscape orientation, on Insta it is square, Tik-Tok is vertical) and you slowly see how 80% of your content either needs re-doing for a specific platform or not usable at all.

• Pay-to-win

With the vast amount of content posted to social media every day, most platforms are struggling to stay afloat, due to the immense expenses for servers, etc. For example, Youtube was never actually profitable in its long history. So they start implementing new ways to get money from their users, mostly focused on people who are business-oriented e.g. they limit your reach, so you have to pay for sponsored posts, block or indirectly block (limit heavily your reach) content branching out to your website or Amazon store or whatever, as long as it leads away from the platform.

• Oversaturation

So you survived through the initial dilemmas and came to terms with the pay-to-win approach (at the end there is no free advertisement) and start working on content related to your business, but then you see that if not every then every second person in your field is doing the same and you are just throwing away hours of work in the sea of content and if you sit down to calculate your conversion rates divided by the hours you spent creating content and perfecting skills than most of us didn’t have before starting this, but need to proceed, you will be actually losing money.

• Too many rules

If you are still going forward, you will start digging up info on algorithms and “best way to create content for X” platform in a desperate attempt to trick the all-mighty AI controlling your exposure and getting that viral content that will bring you soo many customers that this will make up for all the non-paid hours of work you put in. But the truth comes knocking on the door again, most platforms keep their algorithms a secret, so you strat viewing content on people who are successful on the platform in the hopes of them sharing their secret, but the truth is they got lucky (quote from the biggest Youtuber - Pewdipie) they know some of the things they did right, but there is no 1-2-3 formula.

• Political tension

If all the above wasn’t enough, mainstream media feels threatened from the new age media platforms, so they used the power they still have in politics to pull down a sh*t tone of regulations on the platforms, crippling even successful people on them, and you never know what’s the next thing coming and if they are not just gonna ban those platforms or drive them completely out of business. The last won’t be hard as mentioned most platforms are struggling to keep a-float.

Freedom

One of the greatest things about blogging is that you have much more freedom than in social media. If you want to include a link to something you posted on Insta, Youtube, Facebook, go ahead it won’t affect the performance of your blog post in a negative way. You took a photo that’s relevant to your post, great, you don’t have to think about the format of the photo, compression, will it pass to my feed structure, etc. You want to write a loooong post regarding something you are interested in, JUST DO IT. You don’t like the layout of something, JUST CHANGE IT. You have soo much freedom when you are not stuck to some layout, guidelines, and all of the rest of the limitations listed above.

Side benefits

More traffic

If your blog is on the website you are hosting your portfolio (like mine), you will inevitably drive more traffic to your portfolio as well. Which in its terms will bring you more potential clients and work. Unlike when you post on social media and try to get people to click on your portfolio link, this is approach is much more effective.

Better credibility

Doing something well and showing the results is always good, but actually taking the time to write helpful posts and teach will escalate you to the next level. By showing a deep understanding of the topic will place you in the categories of top professionals and will open many doors that were previously closed. Let’s take photography as an example, you can tell a client “Hey, if you spend an extra X, we can make better photos” it won’t work, but if you say “Hey if you spend an extra X, we can make better photos and here is a detailed article I wrote on the differences and benefits from making this and why it is worth spending the extra money on it”, this will raise your chances for the customer to accept your offer drastically.

Make additional income

More and more people are going into freelancing and are looking up online on tips, information, and anything helpful from people who already work in the field they chose. So this gives you a huge opportunity to earn some additional income in multiple ways (I will make a separate post with more details), but shortly some examples - ads on your posts, paid mentorship programs, selling digital and non-digital products that can help those people (within your post or using your posts to drive traffic to your store).

Conclusion

There is no time like the present. I know it sounds cliché, but as things move more and more online, more regulations apply, so why not “own your space” where you will have freedom instead of “renting” social media space. I would love to hear from you if you already have a blog how has this affected your business or if not what’s holding you back?