The Benefits of Daily Blogging

As I post this, I’m approaching my three-thousandth blog post. That’s over seven years of daily blog posts. And, following the methodology described earlier, I have no concerns about generating several thousand more items.

But what are the benefits of all this work?

Here are a few I could think of:

1. Though I said earlier that a daily blog on its own is not likely to grab people’s attention, a daily blog as part of a set of tools is a powerful thing. The persistence and energy that goes into a daily blog is suddenly utilised when it is part of a bigger machine: readers in groups and elsewhere on social media will access your content because you have pre-selected them to do so using the group or whatever it is. This has some spin-off benefits.

2. One of the spin-off benefits of having a daily blog connected to a social media machine of some kind is that it helps you to persist. To build anything commercially viable, you have to persist. Most businesses take at least three years to build up enough steam to sustain themselves and this is no different. But instead of having your attention splattered over a number of things you need to do to ‘persist’, a daily blog will focus you on your core content and force you to produce more of it, compelling you to overcome all kinds of obstacles that life will throw up, and sitting you down and making you write, demanding that you sweep away other lesser concerns and re-find your heart every day.

Apart from every 1,000 or 2,000 word article you create for your blog potentially becoming another chapter or section of a future book, you are also feeding your larger machine with key content which you might not otherwise feel you have the time to create. 1,000 words every day, 365,000 words at the end of a year - yes, it’s books, it’s courses, but it’s also visible persistence.

Focus on churning out items will end you up with a large amount of credibility, whatever field you’re operating in.

3. You will come to understand and know your field even more than you already do because the discipline of having to write more and more about it will force you to explore outside what you already know, or to look at what you already know from different angles or in different lights. You will become more of an expert in your field because of writing a daily blog.

4. You will come to understand and know your public even more than you already do because the discipline of generating more and more content that will interest them will compel you to find out more and more about what interests them. In confronting the need for seven articles a week, you will discover things about your public that you never suspected, things which will probably change your entire mindset about who they are and what you can do for them. Heck, it might even modify your entire plan or idea of what you are doing. If you don’t write a daily blog? Sure, you probably have enough skills and expertise to get by, but you’ll never know what you don’t know.

5. Daily blog posting is like Olympic training. You will overcome ’writers’ block’ time after time as the discipline demands that you break through. And very soon you will find that your mental muscles are stronger, and that you can put together a piece of compelling content faster and more potently than you would ever have dreamed possible.

6. This mental fitness will spill over onto other areas. Blanks, frustrations, gaps, barriers that you encounter in other aspects of what you are doing will more likely melt away because you are making yourself stronger with daily training.

7. Soon you’ll be playing with your subject, just as an athlete gets so capable that he or she can really enjoy new levels of performance and play with the highest. You’ll be able to go long and deep into things; you’ll be able to stay exterior and light about things; you’ll be able to jump between quick overviews and the analysis of the core of your topic in an instant.

8. Your reputation will grow. It only takes one or two posts to get out there, beyond the circles in which you move, and you’ll be entering viral territory, where people you have never encountered even on social media are reading your material and hearing your name. Be smart, be persistent, and you will develop a gravity and a gravitas which will attract attention from further away. Furthermore, when people do fly in and visit your blog, you will have the most awesome back catalogue of items imaginable. There’s your ‘Wow’ factor - people will remember you and bookmark your page for future reference.

Without a daily blog, you’ll survive, but recognise these possible consequences:

• your persistence and energy will not be as high, and your attention will be more easily scattered and distracted

• you will not be accumulating daily the material for future use, which means that, in order to develop that material, you will have to set aside blocks of time - so you might as well do it the daily blog way and save yourself that time

• a lower amount of material means a lower amount of credibility, whatever field you’re operating in

• your understanding and knowledge of your field will be less than it might have been

• your understanding and knowledge of your public will be less than it might have been

• your entire plan or idea of what you are doing may never quite reach its full potential

• your mental muscles will remain as they are, more or less, instead of growing stronger

• blanks, frustrations, gaps, barriers that you encounter in other aspects of what you are doing will seem more solid and difficult than they might otherwise have seemed

• your mastery of your subject will remain more or less fixed

Of course, you don’t have to do a daily blog. You don’t have to do a blog at all. You don’t have to do anything. But these are the pros and cons of the situation, should you be interested.

You may think of more. I hope that you do. The more you think, the more material you’ll be able to develop, if you wish to do so.

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