Blog by Toby Welch

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Should You Blog? Pros and Cons...

Should you blog? That is a question almost everyone ponders at one time or another. After all, most of us have something to share whether it's our knowledge, details about an extended trip, or how-to tips.
Blogging has numerous advantages:

- Convenient and low-cost way to promote and market yourself and your writing.

- Increased exposure for yourself and your writing.

- Helps you find and/or hone your writing voice and continually improve your craft.

- A creative outlet for expression.

- Gives the blogger a way to interact with his/her audience, including readers and fans.

- A way to connect with other writers.

- An avenue for developing content or conquering a writing project.

- A source for promoting your writing services, selling your e-books, and such.

- A cheap form of therapy - a blog can allow you to blow off steam.

- A means of networking.

- A way to make additional income if you use advertisement generating software or an established online program like Google AdSense.

- If you blog on your website, it gives you fresh content on a regular basis, which translates to a higher ranking in search engines. It also – hopefully - keeps your readers coming back.

- A way to immerse yourself in the online world of social media; a blog can be a convenient home base for all of your social media activity.

- A means of developing a strong online presence and platform.

- Helps you establish credibility in your industry.

- Your own personal soap box. (Caution: don’t overdo this one!)

As for the downsides of blogging, the complaint most people have is that it takes up too much time, time that they would rather spend doing something else. Blogging can easily eat up a lot of minutes if you let it. Not only that, it can be a lot of work. Some people find it hard to continually come up with ideas on what to blog about and others find it challenging to stay motivated to write the blog posts. For ideas, the Internet is filled with topics you could write about, you just have to look. As for motivation, keep your reasons for blogging in the forefront of your mind to keep yourself posting. 

A fellow blogger I know uses one of those pens and notepads that transcribes whatever she writes into a document on her computer. Then she just has to post it after she is done editing it. She finds that she can pound out a blog post when waiting at a doctor's office for an appointment or when she is a few minutes early picking up her kids from an activity. And on the days she takes the commuter bus to work, she can get three or four posts done. 

If you want to be a blogger, you will find a way to make it happen. Good luck!