When surfing the web, it seems to be filled with an abundance of blogs and silly cat videos. While funny videos of cats may take longer to become redundant, blogging can often seem like a daunting and sometimes pointless task. I’m here to tell you to stop chasing your cat around with a camera, to sit down and get back to blogging. Anything worthwhile usually takes a bit of work; the same goes for your blogging. Whether you’re blogging for yourself, your company, or a client, blogging is a way to add an increased sense of depth, humanization, and can drive engagement. As a student eagerly awaiting the world of public relations, blogging is an exemplary way of improving your writing skills and getting your name out there. For seasoned professionals, blogging is equally as important as a platform to communicate with current and prospective clientele and customers.
Blogging doesn’t always flow naturally. Occasionally it requires a great deal of effort. We understand how difficult it can be to stand out (although we did deliver you the perfect formula to remarkable content). Blogging is good for you, we swear. To prove it, we’ve compiled a list of the benefits of maintaining a blog.
Improving yourself: It can be difficult to come up with topics for blogs. When it comes to your personal blog, coming up with fresh content can be even more difficult. Be brave and keep creating content! Get creative. Blogging improves your writing— a is tremendously important if you pursue a career in PR. Maintaining one post a week will help you become more creative, better develop your writing skills and will give you content to add to your portfolio.
Developing Your Voice: Similar to improving your writing skills, blogging helps you find your voice. How do you “speak” when you write? What impression do you give off? Who is your default audience? In blogging, you create opportunities to learn what your individual writing voice is. Once you learn that, you can begin to grow and develop your voice to suit different audiences and topics. By developing your voice, you can stay true to yourself while becoming more diverse in your writing to meet the needs of any potential client.
Relationships: Did you know journalists and news editors read blogs to find interesting story ideas? They do. Use your blog to build relationships with an abundance of people with similar interests. Utilize the insights and connections from journalists to share your interesting story with their resources. Build relationships with those who share your passion for your chosen industry or hobbies. Your blog is not only an outlet for your writing, it is a way to communicate with those around you. Share your story, listen to others, seek feedback and cultivate relationships. Allow your blogging to improve your communication skills and watch your world grow.
Branding: Let’s be realistic, an undergraduate degree is rapidly becoming what the high school diploma was during our parent’s era. We need to learn how to stand out among the sea of qualified individuals. Blogging can help you do that. In publishing content that is uniquely yours, you become more than a name and skill set on a resumé, you become a unique individual with passions, insights, and a voice.
Credibility: Blogging about a consistent topic eventually leads to creating an informed audience. When you begin to consistently inform your audience about a general topic, you’ll eventually become associated with this topic. It is through this process that you become credible. Credibility is an incredibly powerful force for both you personally and the company you may represent. Becoming an expert in the field sets you apart from the masses both on a personal and business level. If you don’t know enough yet to become an expert, fear not! Study, study, study, keep blogging, and work towards becoming an expert in your field.
SEO: The delicate balance of utilizing keywords to increase your SEO and allowing your website to appear on more online searches. Whether you’re new to PR or an old pro, SEO is an imperative process of driving traffic to a website. Blogging can aid the process of SEO and help your website appear in more searches and to be ranked higher among those searches. By adding keywords that contain value and are relevant to your content, your SEO will improve. With improved SEO, you’ll have more traffic driven to your website; from there you can work to generate that traffic into leads.
Still looking for reasons why you should stay consistent with your blogging? Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t. Go forth and blog, it’s good for you.
