Why blog

Blogging is an important part of any content marketing strategy because it is the part of your site that you will most frequently update with new posts and information to keep readers engaged. Create a data-driven content calendar to maximize the success of your blogs. With an upkept blog, you will be regularly putting out fresh content that covers topics that people want to learn about.

Intelligent, well written posts will help you establish your company as an authority in the field. These blog posts will also contain prominent keywords in your industry, helping your post rank well in SERPs. When people find the content in your blog helpful, they will also create links to individual pages which can build your organic backlink profile. These benefits will help boost your ranking, and therefore your visibility.

Regular blogging also builds your organization. Writing is one of those things, but there are others. Blogging teaches you introspection. I've already shared how blogging helped me understand myself and my place in the world. But I'm not the only one. My friend Scott Dinsmore told me he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life until he started a blog.

Sitting down to write made him realize what was important. Now, he leads a global community of people who are rethinking the way they approach work — all because Scott started a blog. Blogging gives you a voice. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print. The same goes for the recount, the Iraq War, the revelations of Abu Ghraib, the death of John Paul II, or any of the other history-making events of the past decade. There is simply no way to write about them in real time without revealing a huge amount about yourself.

And the intimate bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times, say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.

The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys.

This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends. These friends, moreover, are an integral part of the blog itself—sources of solace, company, provocation, hurt, and correction. Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions.

And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources, nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him. Some of this material—e-mails from soldiers on the front lines, from scientists explaining new research, from dissident Washington writers too scared to say what they think in their own partisan redoubts—might never have seen the light of day before the blogosphere.

And some of it, of course, is dubious stuff. Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper.

A good blog is your own private Wikipedia. Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now. There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section.

But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you. Fellow bloggers are always expanding this knowledge base.

Eight years ago, the blogosphere felt like a handful of individual cranks fighting with one another. Today, it feels like a universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating readerships, fighting with one another. To the neophyte reader, or blogger, it can seem overwhelming.

But there is a connection between the intimacy of the early years and the industry it has become today. And the connection is human individuality. The pioneers of online journalism— Slate and Salon—are still very popular, and successful.

But the more memorable stars of the Internet—even within those two sites—are all personally branded. Daily Kos, for example, is written by hundreds of bloggers, and amended by thousands of commenters. But it is named after Markos Moulitsas, who started it, and his own prose still provides a backbone to the front-page blog. The biggest news-aggregator site in the world, the Drudge Report, is named after its founder, Matt Drudge, who somehow conveys a unified sensibility through his selection of links, images, and stories.

The vast, expanding universe of The Huffington Post still finds some semblance of coherence in the Cambridge-Greek twang of Arianna; the entire world of online celebrity gossip circles the drain of Perez Hilton; and the investigative journalism, reviewing, and commentary of Talking Points Memo is still tied together by the tone of Josh Marshall. What endures is a human brand. Readers have encountered this phenomenon before— I. It stems, I think, from the conversational style that blogging rewards.

What you want in a conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising. People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.

But writing in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic and readers you will get. The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas.

The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is not the only fuel in the tank. Sensationalism, dirt, and the ease of formulaic talking points always beckon. You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with. But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock.

This encourages polarized slugfests. But online, at least you see both sides. Reading The Nation or National Review before the Internet existed allowed for more cocooning than the wide-open online sluice gates do now.

For example, speaking engagements or press. I've had people contact me to speak at conferences who found me through my blog. Blogging enables anyone with something interesting or valuable to say to be identified as an expert. Blogging forces you to teach yourself what you don't know and to articulate what you do know.

When you begin writing a blog post, you are forced to organize your thoughts. If there are any gaps in the topic that you are writing about, you will have to learn about it. Writing out and articulating your thoughts is a great way to internalize something you've learned or experienced.

Writing helps you become more familiar with the topic you're writing about. Blogging enables you to be your own media company. You can tell your story the way you want to tell it without being dependent on journalists. When you are writing about a topic of your own interest, you can decide how to portray a story, what information to include, and what information to exclude. Blogging allows you to ensure that all information included in the blog is factual.