Should You Launch Your Own Blog?
You have a lot to say. Maybe you've started to gain recognition from the great work you're doing within your chosen expertise of corporate development or graphic design or bee behavior. You see the infinite flow of blog posts and social media chatter and you think maybe you're missing out. Maybe all these professional or personal accomplishments are a bit less bright without a shiny and growing digital footprint to broadcast them to the world.
That's when you ask a marketing professional like me whether it's time for you to start a blog. And then you ask me how.
First things first.
Should you start a blog?
YES, if:
You enjoy writing and can do it relatively quickly
You can make the time to write regularly
You have stuff you want to say publicly, to the whole world
You can live with imperfection; you can publish even if it's not Shakespeare
You're ready for people to have opinions about what you have to say
You have at least a general sense of who your intended audience would be
You're blogging to communicate or inspire interest in a business venture, a side project, or anything that has a life beyond the blog
By now you've figured out if you didn't answer yes to all of the above, you might want to rethink this whole blogging idea.
Where should you blog?
This question is probably more challenging for most experts-turned-bloggers than the question of whether you should blog at all. If you don't live in the world of content marketing, the sheer volume of options can be quite overwhelming. Most of them can be lumped into two categories.
Launch your own site
There are plenty of platforms that claim to make it easy peasy to launch your own blog or website in minutes. Squarespace and Wix are the biggest names right now in the no-coding-needed, launch-it-in-minutes club. WordPress tends to be the favorite of pro bloggers. I'll compare these options in a future post, and share how I chose my platform.
Nothing is as easy as 1-2-3 when it comes to building a blog or website. If you're just dipping a toe in here and you have no experience with building or managing websites, building and launching your own blog is going to come with a steep learning curve and require either an investment of your time or your money to buy someone else's time to build the thing for you. Maybe you want to learn how to do this stuff, so the time investment will feel worthwhile. Maybe you really want to have your own thing, so hiring a WordPress expert to build your site and be there to help if you get stuck will feel like a worthwhile expense. If neither of these rings true for you, read on.Blog on an existing platform
This is the option I recommend to most new bloggers, especially if your expertise is not in the realms of marketing or tech. LinkedIn, Medium, HuffPo... There are great sites out there that make it easy to get your voice heard. Anyone can publish to LinkedIn, and if you're asking me this question, you likely already know your way around LinkedIn. Same goes for Medium -- you just set up an account and start publishing. HuffPo is a bit more choosy, but by all means, drop a line and see what happens.
By blogging on an existing platform, you skip all the time and energy you'd need to devote to decisions about templates and style and architecture. You just type and click. You can focus on developing your voice, honing your blogging skills, and confirming that you do in fact want to have your very own blog. Then, once you're past the 'just getting started phase,' you can revisit whether it's time to launch your own site.
And it's no longer dangerous to publish your articles in multiple locations (that used to make the Google cranky), so go nuts and post everywhere.