Why You Should Create A Blog, Personal or Professional, And What Are Its Benefits

A bit of a 4th wall break for the post today. 

This week I had finally publicly announced a personal blog project I have been working on. I was delighted to find my friends and family finding the blog to be unique and humorous. But then comes the question of “why?”. 

So in today's topic I hope to help our readers understand the actual benefits of starting a blog, professional and personal, besides self journaling satisfaction.

Personal Blogs 

Blogs unrelated to a particular business are regarded as a personal or hobby blog. These blogs create original content and often only generate niche readers who are interested in the topic. Often unexpected by the creator though, blogs are an important asset to SEO providers. When it comes to backlinking and establishing an authoritative website, the destination and quality of the anchor text plays a major role in ranking. Similar to advertising, personal blogs can become monetized with backlinks or ads with enough organic traffic. Another  great use of a personal blog is to boost your professional website.

Professional Blogs

There are a few main reasons why you should start a professional blog for your business website.

Increase your organic traffic

Establish higher authority for keywords

Gain credibility

Higher customer satisfaction

By creating a professional blog and covering your services, not only do you create more index pages within your domain, boosting your authority as a content creator or google, you in turn help increase traffic and customer satisfaction by providing further information on your services. 

As simple as it sounds, blogging is a big part of creating an authoritative website. Without a blog, a business can only create so many pages regarding the services they provide without complicating the navigational UI of their website. 

How to create a decent blog page

The purpose of this post is to cover the benefits of blogging, however, if you are keen to design a blog yourself, here are a few tips to create a great blog page. 

To sum it up simply, have a minimum 500 words of optimized content, proper internal linking, and blog page anatomy. There is a limitless amount of information when it comes to designing a blog page but here are a few great reads to help you along the way.

Featured as the image for this post, Gill Andrews has created great checklists for blog page anatomy and many others. 

When it comes to content of the blog, Semrush has a detailed description and process on how to create authoritative content here. 

Shortly in the future I hope to cover an over-the-shoulder way to optimize blog page content. But I haven't decided if that should be in video format or another blog post. I believe it would be helpful to our readers and much easier to understand when it’s more of a how-to instead of a dumping of information such as this. 

Lastly, the tone of your blog and the way it is written also matters to some degree. As you can see, even with professional blogs I tend to keep it in a first person and casual tone. I have chosen this direction because readers are typically more engaged in reading a conversation/story than an informational manual. But this varies depending on the business and should be considered thoroughly. 

Semrush has another great post on tone of voice and techniques to writing an effective post, you can find that here.