Blogging … a natural evolution

Throughout history people have always wanted to share their stories. It started with cave paintings, campfire tales, carvings in stone tablets and scrolls which evolved into books. Some of the more artistic and creative people have told their stories through paintings, sculptures, songs and poetry. With Valentine’s day a few weeks ago, I couldn’t hep but remember the old tradition of carving a statement of love into a tree or park bench.

There are many others, but these are just some of the ways that people have shared ideas and left their mark on society.

Why do people do this?

It’s human nature to want to tell your story – to be immortalised through words or images and blogging is simply the 21st century’s way of doing this.

I started a personal blog a couple of years ago because I wanted to keep in touch with friends overseas but could never find the time to email each of them… and I didn’t want to spam them with generic emails, but I still wanted to keep in contact. When they would call me and ask what I had been up to, on the spur of the moment, I could never recall half the stuff I had done recently.

So I started a blog.

Blogging helps me take note of the everyday stuff that would otherwise go unnoted. It helps me share ideas directly after they happen so that the emotions that go with the recent event shine through in my writing.

Although some people wouldn’t want to sit-down and spend an hour writing about random happenings. Perhaps you don’t think that anything interesting enough happens in your life to justify a full blog post. Some people would rather just jot down a few thoughts, ideas or snippets of what is currently going on. If this is you, then I’d recommend micro-blogging through Twitter (but be warned, it can be quite addictive).

The other great thing about a blog (be it a full blog on it’s own domain, a blog built-in to one of the many social networking sites or even a microblog on Twitter) is that it can be incredibly stress relieving. If you’ve had a crap day you can always have a rant on your blog and I can guarantee you that afterwards you’ll feel so much better for getting it off your chest.

But who would read it?

I only ever expected a few friends to read my personal blog and maybe a couple of family members and I had no idea how many people would read this corporate blog… but that’s where I was wrong.

A few humorous posts inspired by some funny emails I received, plus the odd story of me doing something stupid (which is a fairly common occurrence) seemed to attract a few odd, long-tail searches. This lead to a few people thinking the content was worthy for a couple of social media sites and before I knew it, I had a bunch of complete strangers regularly checking-out what I had been up to.

This is less likely to happen with a corporate blog, but the concepts are still the same. Once your clients know you have a blog, they are more likely to take a greater interest in your business. It will give your company a voice that will appear to be speaking directly to those readers – and the impact this will have on word-of-mouth traffic (both online and offline) will become noticeable.

There are many other great reasons to have a blog – things like: the search engines indexing the pages faster than any other type of website, it’s probably the easiest way to add fresh content to an existing website, it can attract great long-tail search terms and you’d be amazed at the links you can gain without even trying… but even after all of this, if you’re still not inspired you to start a blog of your own, I’d like to invite my readers can share their blogging advice and success stories, which will hopefully change your mind.