Blogging Makes You Better

Written by: Gary Horsman

Expertise and Blogging

What’s In It for You!

An important aspect of blogging – that is often not considered – is that blogging makes you better. The act of blogging requires that you think up topics, research them, clarify them, promote your blogging posts and then observe the response. Each of these activities and the combined process makes you better at what you blog about.

Expertise and Blogging – Topic Ideas

The first step is often to develop ideas for blog posts. Ideas can come from anywhere. Ideas can come from other blogs, a book or article, a news report you hear on the radio or conversations with people. When you are blogging you need to have ideas for posts so you are always on the lookout for topics. Since you are looking for ideas you see more opportunities in general. This heightened awareness and the thinking of the possibilities makes you better.

Expertise and Blogging – Research

Once you define a topic for a post or set of posts then you have to do some research. To conduct research means that you have to dig in a bit deeper. You may look for graphs that explain the detail better; you may research quotes to bring a certain perspective to your post. You may read some materials in a related field that can then be applied to your business.

You can think about the research as doing your homework. When you are trying to learn something it is always your self-effort that enables you to learn something well. This self-effort can be stimulated by a lecture or a conversation but the real learning starts when you take it upon yourself to dig in a bit deeper – to learn more and in your own way. This helps you to improve and develop your expertise.

Research is also about asking the right questions. It is about asking questions defined in a particular way for your audience. Your research makes you better also because you are conducting research that will provide valuable information to your audience.

Expertise and Blogging – Writing & Creating Clarity

To write is a process of clarification. You need to think about what you want to say and then write about it in an easy-to-read and engaging manner. You have to set a tone and consider the language you will use.

It is a great deal like teaching. If you learn something to the point where you can teach it then you have learned it well. To write about your topic and the research you conducted on the topic clearly makes you better. The writing process adds to your expertise.

Expertise and Blogging – Promoting the Message

The next step is to promote your blog materials. This cannot happen by accident. You need to make connections. Making connections increase your ability to work with other people. Promoting your materials requires that you learn more about your target audience and where they spend their time online. To promote in the search engines means that you need to learn proper search engine optimization techniques and then learn how to apply them.

Learning how to promote your materials and reach a bigger audience in a meaningful way makes you better.

Expertise and Blogging – Measuring Your Results

To measure means that you observe the results of your efforts. Does your traffic increase because you published more materials on a specific topic? Is your bounce rate relatively low or high? If it is too high then you may need to think about your writing as it is not as engaging as you desire.

To measure your results means to receive feedback from your audience. Anyone doing any work can benefit by receiving feedback from who counts. Your audience is who counts so to measure the effectiveness of your blogging by receiving feedback from them also is a key part of the process to make you better at what you do.

To increase your expertise and blogging prowess and to learn more about blogging in general I invite you to read more posts within the SEO Notebook. This blog is filled with ideas on how to improve your exposure and do more and better business.

I also encourage you to visit our newest section on content marketing. Blogging and content marketing can be closely related and I think that you can benefit by taking any of all of our content marketing tutorials.