Why You Should Start a Blog

Have you ever thought about starting your own blog? I started reading fashion and healthy living blogs wayyyy back in 2008. Many of the blogs I started reading six years ago are now among the most popular in their respective fields. I thought about starting a blog for years, but I never followed through. This blog is now almost eight months old and I am constantly amazed by it. I get more and more pageviews each week, and I love to see where all of you live. People visit my blog from all over the world - Russia, Singapore, Brazil, Germany, South Africa (hi everyone!) - which is one of my favourite things about blogging. Even though I am definitely an amateur, today I wanted to share my experience about blogging and why I think you should start your own blog if you've been thinking about it.

Why I Started a Blog
I've never talked about this before but I started this blog as a school project. I was assigned the task of creating and maintaining a blog in my Integrated Marketing Communications class. I am actually ashamed to admit that after thinking about starting a blog for so many years, that was the reason I did it. If I knew how much I was going to enjoy it, I definitely would have pushed myself to do it sooner. The blog project was due back at the beginning of April and I decided to continue blogging.

Why You Should Start a Blog
Many of my friends tell me that they enjoy reading my blog and want to start their own. My advice to them is to go for it! It can definitely be intimidating to put such a personal space onto the Internet, especially considering all the talented, incredibly successful bloggers out there. However, my experience in the blog world is that it is a positive, welcoming place.

Blogging is a wonderful creative outlet. If you consider yourself to be a creative or kind-of-creative person, a blog can be a great outlet to express all of the ideas swirling around in your head. A couple years ago, I had a 9-5 in a very rigid, conservative field. It didn't do much for my creative side, and I wish that I had had a blog back then to help me exercise the left side of my brain. You can blog about anything, as long as you have an interest in it and know a thing or two about it. If you feel like you might not be able to think of enough original content, I think it is perfectly okay to blog about things that inspire you as long as you source the images/content.

Blogging is pushing me to learn new skills. I like to think I'm pretty adept at using a computer, but I have no knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I am committed to teaching myself how to use these programs in order to improve my blogging skills. I also want to improve my photography. As well, sometimes I have an idea for a post that I need to do some research on. These posts have led me to expand my own knowledge of lifestyle topics.

Blogging is easy. I use Blogger and I've had a fairly good experience with it so far as it is very user friendly. You can also Google any questions you have, whether it is how to add social media buttons to your blog or how to optimize it for search engines, and the answers are easy to find.

My biggest piece of advice is to be consistent. I usually post on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, depending on my schedule as well as how many posts I've prepared ahead of time. Once you start to gain a steady readership, it is important that your readers know when they can expect new posts from you.

I hope this post was useful to you and that you start your own blog if you've been thinking of doing so!