As William Shakespeare might have said (if he’d been alive today), “To blog or not to blog: that is the question”. If you want an online voice for yourself, your business, or your organization, your blog is your personal newspaper, radio and TV channel rolled into one.
It’s been estimated over 100 million blogs have been created in the past decade. How many of them are any good? That depends… what’s tickles your taste buds?
Whilst only a hundred swimmers will win gold medals at the next Olympics there’s a few million others happy to paddle around in a pool. They’re challenging themselves, exercising their faculties and expressing themselves.
Whilst the quality of blogs naturally vary, the good news is… human expression is alive and well! After all, no one says you have to read all of them…
Action : What’s your reason for blogging? Is it to put out your thoughts and ideas? Forward your business or organization? Or simply to connect with your fellow human beings? Write a Statement of Intent as your first blog post.
In the good old days of only a decade or so ago, there were a couple of free to air TV channels to focus your eyeballs on, two or three newspapers to digest, a bucket load of magazines to devour and a handful of radio stations to tune your ear to.
Now we have the opportunity to change our diets through the humble blog. We can still consume as much as we want, and now, wait for it, we can become our own producers too! Text, images, audio and video.
You’re now in charge of your own media channel, Channel You!
Action : If you were head of your own media channel, what would you present? Would it be music? Video? News? Photos? Map out your media mogul goal and start blogging. Apply this to your business or organization.
The internet is based upon one simple principle: connection. At the technical level, the hyperlink is the glue that holds the web together. It lets you link from one page to another.
Blogs rely on links too! Firstly, when you publish a post you can easily link to other web content on your site, your blog or to one of the other billion or so pages on the web.
More significantly, these links build social connection too and social connection is at the heart of being human. Blog posts let readers comment prompting conversations with people you’ve never met from around the world. Link up enough people and these conversations build communities.
Many people dismiss blogs and social networking sites like Facebook as time wasters. Instead, consider them as social glue. And this might be the most important reason of all to start your blog today.
Action : Who do you want to connect to? What do you want to build a community around? Your family? Your friends whilst you travel overseas? Your business? A social cause? A hobby? An idea? Write it down.
This is an excerpt from Book Rapper issue ‘We Blog’ and derived from Michael A Banks, Blogging Heroes.
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