6 Reasons to have a Personal Blog

The identity of blogs has seen a couple of shifts over the past several years. It used to be that blogs were this somewhat prestigious way of garnering an audience online, albeit with a bit of work. Writers would setup their blogspot, wordpress site or website and start writing and using social media to draw traffic to their blog. Over the years social media became increasingly ingrained into most people’s lives; for most of us it was easier to just post a tweet or instagram post with a short caption regularly instead of writing, editing & publishing long blog posts, and for longer form content vlogs & other styles of video were doing good

Still, the format has persisted in various ways especially in the tech world, with tech teams often having a team or company blog and developers using it to write about their development journey as part of this celebrated culture of sharing within the software development community. As with a lot of disruptive technologies, it didn’t outright get replaced but there are now more formats to complement each other

There are a lot of different ways to get into blogging or writing posts now, and it’s particularly recommended for people in technical & creative fields to partake in it, whether it’s a personal blog or joining a blogging site. Here I’ll share 6 reasons that I think it’s a good idea to have a personal blog, which you can host yourself on a free subdomain like github’s or on a personal domain you own

Freedom of expression & creativity

The obvious first thing is that on your site you don’t have to try to conform to any algorithm or specific format or expectations, you can use your blog for writing and posting about anything from your career journey to personal moments in one place. You might be keen on keeping it topical so that your content looks valuable to a specific audience but it’s easily organized with tags & pages so for any visitor it’ll be easy to see what’s up

In fact, a blog doesn’t really have to be for anyone else, you can use it like a journal and share it or just let it sit there and refer to it when you need to

Own your traffic

When posting your high quality content on other social & community sites you’re mostly directing traffic towards the website, not your profile. Big sites’ algorithms love to distract visitors with other people’s content to click away to and get lost in the rabbit hole. If it ever happens that your account is closed, your profile lost or the site is shutdown you also lose your entire history there; all your followers, friends and posts gone in a puff of smoke

Having said that, it’s not as easy to drive traffic to a personal blog even with good SEO. One way is to use your posts on other sites to link to relevant blog posts, and present an option for visitors to subscribe via RSS or especially email to keep updated and for a way for you to reach them whenever you need to in the future. Keeping a secure mailing list of people who trust in you or associate with you is a good move

Supplement your other posts

A lot of us are for the most part content with just tweeting or posting images with captions, but there are times when you need to elaborate on something important or write an open letter. Instead of using a twitter thread of 20 tweets, linking to a twitlonger page or using a long chain of stories, you might use your blog or site to dive deep into the subjecy in isolation and link to it in the short-form post on the social media sites

Archive your struggles

This isn’t like those times you’re trying to go to sleep at 3am and your brain presents to you a fine selection of the most embarrassing moments from your highschool days. This is about documenting your biggest struggles, especially after finally figuring out a solution, and writing it down so that you can refer back to it later or that someone going through the same thing can find that solution. It’s not always stackoverflow that answers a developer’s prayers, a lot of answers come in the form of personal blog posts (which are sometimes linked in a stackoverflow answer)

On social media we’re incentivised to only show our good side, always comparing to other profiles, and for the most part avoiding exposing vulnerability. By documenting our struggles and victories we can appear more human and paint a more natural image of our growth (albeit still a simple image)

Generate content ideas

Most formats on social media sites perform best as very simple & short content, so for most value-oriented content creators a single piece of long-form media can be the source of multiple posts across different platforms. Your blog post could already be drawn from a book or seminar or something, but with one detailed post you could extrapolate ideas & material for other sites; you might summarize your main point or headlines for Twitter, you might put them into a visual narrative for an Instagram carousel or talk about 1 or 2 of them at a time in a reel, you might dance on some TikToks in between writing a script based on the article for a YouTube video

You could even cross post related content, like posting web dev tutorials on Dev.to and your personal blog, or making a tutorial video and embedding it in the article along with linking from the video to the article for a different format or copyable code snippets

Train your creative brain

Writing is a form of creative expression and it’s a timeless skill to learn and master. Whether you’re writing tutorials or writing stories about your life, the more you do it the better you get at it, and combined with other platforms you can learn to communicate the same ideas in different formats and with different constraints until the constraints don’t really matter anymore. If you’re not used to writing a lot the large space you get with a blog post itself can be a constraint

As a wise man once said, “You don’t need creativity to deal with freedom, you need creativity to deal with constraints”

Summary

Consider these points if you’re interested at all in having a personal blog site or advising someone else to do so:

• Freedom of expression to write whatever you like however you like without a care for algorithms & popularity
• Own the traffic and connections that go through your site as you improve your SEO & build up an email list
• Supplement your external posts by elaborating on them or writing a letter to link people to
• Archive your learning struggles and achievement for reference
• Generate lots of content ideas by extrapolating from your own articles
• Train your writing skills as you express similar ideas in different formats, long & short