Let’s accept this:

As marketers, we all have pondered over starting a blog at some point in our career.

And why not?

According to OptinMonster, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts.

As it turns out, blogging not only attracts the quality traffic to your website but it also helps you build authority and establish yourself as a subject matter expert in your domain.

In fact, this is one such reason why I started this blog and I’d rather you should start building it too. So without wasting much time, let’s uncover some reasons to start a blog.

Is starting a blog worth your time and efforts?

Off lately and time and again, you must have experienced an unprecedented surge in discussions over the web on starting a blog.

While many people think that it requires a serious investment of time and resources to build and manage a blogging website, these arguments are nothing but senseless and a pure waste of time. The question should be whether a blog can help you achieve your personal, academic or professional goals, rather than whether one should build one or not.

Having a blog on your name is a great way to make your network and grow on the ‘personal” as well as “professional” front, but, like all tools, it requires a certain investment of time to manage and use it skillfully.

At this point, almost each and every marketer should consider blogging as a serious investment. Here’s why.

Identity

A personal blog is the best way to carve your identity in the minds of the people. There’s a popular belief that says “Good employers like to google a candidate name online before they interview him; just to know him better”.

There are always high chances that your potential future employer can do the same. Afterall they don’t want to hire someone who’s a complete ghost online. Here’s why it makes sense to start a blog now. A blog, whether it be a personal or professional, represents your identity. It allows people to know who you are. So better start working on your identity now and build your career.

Knowledge/ Learning

Building a blog can be great learning experience worth your time. There’s a lot you can do with a website than to fill it with content. When I made this website on Jekyll, I learned a lot more things. I had the good fortune of spending my large chunk of time playing with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I learned that it’s still possible for anyone to make a website without bearing any cost. I have deployed my blog on Netlify, which is an amazing content management system. What’s more, you get to host your static pages on Netlify for FREE; with no hassle of purchasing those expensive hosting plans.

I’m by no means an expert web developer, but I can fix small issues on this blog site, all by myself. Isn’t it amazing? Yes, it is.

A sneak peek of a few things I learned about while building this blog:

• Static web pages: Wordpress is good, but Jekyll is a lot better. I’d tried my hands-on different static site generators like Hugo and Pelican in the past, but I decided to stick with Jekyll. I learned how to host a static website on gh-pages of Github.
• Git: If you are a marketer, you hardly know the basics of Git. But I found it pretty amazing to deal with. Initially, it was a lot of pain to find out the bugs and fix them. But slowly it all paid off at the end. I learned basics Git commands and ways to roll-back the previous versions of the code.
• HTML-CSS: Like I previously mentioned, HTML and CSS are something that I really love to play with. These kinds of stuff are an absolute necessity when you are running your blog on a static website. I’ve made some really nice layouts on my site and I’m slowly learning Javascript which I found really hard to grasp. But I think I’ve still a long way to go.
• Website deployment with Netlify: One of the painful things of continuing with a static website is deployment. You write some code that breaks your website and you spend a large chunk of time figuring out what went wrong. I found Netlify as an amazing way to incorporate continuous integration and deployment to your static website. Just hit the publish button and Netlify would handle the rest of things. In case your website goes unpublish, you can read the deploy notes and figure out what’s wrong with the code.

The list goes on and on. While some of these are stuff that I don’t do when I am in the office, I am glad that I learned them. This is an amazing thing when you own a blog. You learn things, which you don’t get to learn in your profession.

Practice

Practice makes a man better, and so does a blog. When you work on your website, there will be tons of things that you would be implementing day by day. Although, you can’t remember doing all the stuff after a few days. There will be a time when these tips are on your fingertips and you can do your work more quickly. Initially, it took me a lot of time to fix even the smallest of things on my blog website. But as I continue to practice, I can fix things in a minute or five.

Parting words

The year 2020 is on the verge of ending. In a few days, we will be in the year 2021. No matter what situations the upcoming year brings to your life, don’t continue to embarrass yourself. Even worse, don’t wait. Start building your personal blog. I am sure there will be tutorials online. In the upcoming article, I will walk you through the process of building a static website with Jekyll.

Stay tuned and Sayonara!