By Neil Patrick
Plenty of people are completely mystified about why I write this blog. I don’t carry advertising and I’m not selling anything to anyone – so it earns me absolutely no money at all. It takes time I could be using to do other things. And yet I think it’s one of the most useful and valuable things I do in my working week.
If you want to know why, here are my thoughts about this question.
I think it was Publillius Sirus who said,
“A good reputation is more valuable than money”. Whilst a blog cannot determine our reputation completely, it does present our thoughts and ideas to the world for the world to judge. And such openness requires more courage than I thought I really had. For me, as someone who had lived their whole life fairly successfully without social media ever being part of it, writing a blog was a personal challenge. It was the first time in my life I had ever put my thoughts up for the world to see. And that was a scary prospect.
Especially since at first, I had no real idea what I was doing. So I’m the first to admit that for many months this blog was erm, let's say... finding its way...
I’m not about to proclaim that it’s improved; that’s for you to judge, not me. But I can say it has taught me a lot and become immensely more valuable than I ever thought possible. And with over 300,000 hits so far, plenty of people must be at least looking at it occasionally.
When I started, I was obsessed with traffic. I would examine the visitor numbers every day – if it was rising, I felt good. If it was falling, I would give myself a hard time and knuckle down to putting up another post in the hope I could rid myself of my self-imposed fail badge.
I would dig deep into the stats to see which posts were getting most attention and comments and resolve to do more along those lines. A lifetime of marketing management had deeply ingrained these habits in my daily practices.
But none of this really matters a damn. And here’s why I think this.
First, I have learned that blogs should not attempt to be any of the following things:
A fact repository – Wikipedia does that far better than any blog can. If you want facts, you can get them there in an instant on just about any topic you can think of. Just don’t expect anything other than dull as ditch water fact after fact after fact…
A source for the latest news – whilst we can all grumble about this or that bias within the mass media, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the news industry worldwide posting news about everything, every second of every day. You’d be a complete fool to try and compete with that as a blogger.
A discussion forum – if you are a blogger who has many thousands of readers posting their comments regularly – I sincerely congratulate you. But my experience is that comments are becoming increasingly hard to come by for a mixture of reasons – folk don’t wish to publicly share their views or identity; they are super busy; they feel they have nothing to add. I also know that some people struggle with the comment facility on the Blogger platform and if you are one, I apologise, there’s little I can do about that, I‘m afraid. Of course they may also think I still suck at writing blog posts! I respect all these reasons but if you wish to comment, on any of my posts, I will be genuinely appreciative whether you agree or disagree with my opinions.
A way to trick search engines - I’m bemused by the whole SEO industry. It seems to rest on the premise that getting to the top of a Google search for a particular search query is the most important online goal anyone can have. I don’t waste my time with any SEO nonsense. Google will place me where it does and that’s fine. It’s got hundreds of people much smarter than me working everyday to deliver the best search results they can. I'm not going to distract myself and adjust what I write to try and second guess Google's search algorithms. Social media brings me more traffic every day than I could buy from search engines anyway.
So why is a blog valuable?
- A blog is personal and as unique as you are. If you don’t care about something you write about, it shows. So don’t write about it. Choosing topics because they are popular might get you more traffic. So what? Do you want to be running with the pack or carving out your own distinctive voice and position? Personally I choose the latter.
- A blog serves as a notebook and therapy. It’s a place to record your ideas and thoughts at a moment in time. I sometimes look back at my old blog posts with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement at my own naiveté. But these retrospectives help me measure how much I have improved my knowledge, thinking and writing. It’s also a cathartic exercise. Sometimes I have an idea or nagging feeling about something rattling around my head for days on end. Somehow researching the topic and writing a post about it releases that pressure and allows me to lay it to rest…for a while at least.
- It forces us to challenge and refine our opinions. If you are going to stick up a blog post and not care if your facts are correct, your arguments logical and your presentation clear and engaging, then you are a braver writer than me. The process of posting our opinions on a topic for all the world to see imposes a requirement for critical self-assessment that would normally be absent. If we are expressing our opinions to family, friends or colleagues, that’s one thing. Posting them for the world to see is quite another.
- A blog gets you friends all over the world who care about the same things you do. This is the most precious value of my blog. It brings me into contact with great people whom I would never encounter otherwise. Many of them become friends, collaborators and yes even clients.
- A blog will make you much better informed. I’m not a career coach, recruiter, journalist or HR person – in other words the type of people who usually write about jobs and careers. I have no direct vested interest in gaining traffic for this blog. On the upside, this makes me neutral and unbiased. On the downside, because I don’t have a professional background in the areas I am writing about I can justifiably be classed as an amateur. And that’s fine with me – this blog forces me to learn and dig into things that I’d never otherwise bother to find out about.
- You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to have a passion for your topic. I am seriously interested in how things work and what the future holds for the world of work. And this blog has made me even more interested in the subject as I have uncovered more and more intriguing ideas and analyses of what’s really going on. Writing a blog is the best way I know to increase my knowledge of that topic. It requires me to do my homework, to read as much or more than I write and to ask questions.
- It expands our knowledge and encourages us to consider other viewpoints. Not all writers do this, but I will typically research what other writers have said about a topic, before I write about it. Sometimes they provide useful quotes. Other times they introduce me to an aspect I’d not considered. Whatever their contribution, I learn.
- Doing it consistently and regularly is like going to the gym. It builds cognitive and communication muscle! I am not and never will be an Olympic gold medal writer. But I’m not trying to be. If I can be a workmanlike writer, that’s enough for me.
- It’s an opportunity to expose the guilty and praise the good. I have no sponsors that I must serve and please. I write what I believe and if something or someone deserves criticism in my opinion they get it! Others who I feel deserve recognition, I try to support and encourage. In that sense, blogs can be a democratic force for good in the world.
- If you’re not a digital native, a blog rockets you to the front with the cool kids. I’m well past 40 years old, and getting older and hopefully wiser. That makes me a dinosaur in the eyes of people who’ve never known a world without digital and social media. And yes I admit I like the kudos of not conforming to the stegosaurean stereotype.
Blogs are everywhere these days. They are exploding as organisations recognise that having a lot of content on their website pushes their search rank higher. And their content reflects this. It’s copious, pedestrian, unoriginal and tame.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather read a heartfelt piece of writing by a passionate writer that challenges my assumptions than yet another sanitised click bait ‘news’ story any day…
