There's an entire spectrum of reasons to blog, ranging from purely social to purely business.
A quick scroll through ActiveRain's blog roll and it's easy to see the variety of motivations for blogging.
We each find a personal reason to start blogging. What you may find is the reason you started blogging and the reason you continue to blog (or even decide to stop) may change over time.
When I first started blogging on ActiveRain I had a shotgun approach. As much as I could type and any pretty much any topic was fair game. Comments were good. Getting featured was a rush. And watching points accumulate and moving up the Leaderboard pushed me to really get the blogging habit ingrained (the folks that founded this community understood how competitive typical real estate agents are!).
But frankly, my initial blogging was much ado about nothing. Those posts didn't generate business because I wasn't giving consumers reasons to find us or reach out to us. Business was still gained thanks to developing relationships with others in this community and receiving and giving referrals, but home buyers and sellers weren't exactly filling our Inbox with requests for help.
But one of the chief blessings of this community is the Pay It Forward culture. Others shared what worked for them and stubbornly I began to get more focused on posting information that might actually get results. And over time, we did start seeing success.
Flash forward some more and again thanks to things learned from this community, we set up our Wordpress site with IDX capability. A couple of hundred subdivision and specialty search pages later, we had a lot of digital breadcrumbs out there.
We learned what worked for us, and what didn't, and pruned the pages that weren't given us the desired customers. And that's part of the beauty of blogging, you can target your ideal customer.
Do you want to work above or below the average price for your market?
Do you want to have a niche?
Do you want to focus on buyers or sellers?
Understanding your best fit for your preferences and finding the consumers that match can really give you a reason to blog, and to blog selectively to reach your target audience.
But when it comes to why you blog, you still have to ask yourself is it the best use of your time?
I could still blog daily if I chose to. The fundamentals are still in place, there's no shortage of topics once you know how to tune in and convert what you see and do into posts, but for me personally, there reached a point where blogging daily stopped making sense. Evergreen content was key to providing the freedom to blog, or not to blog as I choose.
So the WHY for why I blog today is much different then why I blogged in years past. A bit of Pay It Forward to pay it back for what others shared with me.
Find your Why.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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