A friend of mine asks, Why should I blog? For me the quick and easy answer is because I like it. More specifically, I like writing. And if I look at everything I’ve posted on this blog and my other blog (Piddleville) I realize that what I’m really doing is thinking out loud online. I tend to work out ideas on my blogs.
I’m also playing and learning. Surely that’s a good reason to blog?
There are probably as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers. In recent years, however, the popularity of blogs has grown and, with that growth, blogs got noticed (the blogosphere!) and the inevitable commercial questions popped up: how to monetize this thing? How do I leverage this? What’s the marketing angle?
A lot of bloggers now think in terms of purpose. What should I be writing? Who should I be writing for? How should I be writing this?
And there are oodles of web sites out there providing tips on the how’s, the why’s and the what’s. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine. But for me, it sounds very dreary. It sounds like work.
A few months back I wrote a brief post, Who are we writing for?, where I said, in my case, I write for myself. (I said a bit more than that, however.)
There is thinking, though, that says that’s all well and good but what about how it may affect how you’re perceived by potential employers and clients? This worry can lead to a kind of personal censorship. You may say what you think but, you may not because someone might get the wrong impression.
And what about purpose? Surely a blog should have one, the kind that will build an audience and lead to advertising revenue, maybe a book down the road – even speaking engagements!
Once again, that’s fine for some. But for me, thinking that way more or less leads to a creative drought. This may be partly because you can get caught up with statistics, like unique visitors, and schedules, such as, “I have to post something about this thing every Tuesday.”
Who knows? With all that “purpose” driving us, and with some success, we may find it makes more financial sense to get ghost-bloggers so we can spend our time more efficiently.
Or we may end up caught in a routine of dreary work that doesn’t succeed at all because, realistically, only a few blogs succeed in a commercial sense and there are gazillions that don’t. As I’ve said before, blogs and web sites are a lot like restaurants that way. Success is a bit of a crap shoot (no matter what the experts may tell you).
Why should you blog? You shouldn’t. Not unless you enjoy it. If you do like it then the question becomes, why should you not blog?
If you like music, why would you not sing? If you like movies, why would you not go to them? If you like tennis, why would you not play?
We often get so caught up in purpose – practical purpose – we forget to have fun.
That’s not something I’d want to forget.
(Note: This also relates to another post that I had in draft format but had forgotten about. I would have added it this post but it would have been way too long, so I hope to post “Art, people and personal brands” tomorrow.)
Update (March 2, 2010):
See “Why do you blog if not for money?” on Broadcasting Brain
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