The identity of blogs has seen a couple of shifts over the past decade. Early on, we used to rely on them to find rich content, technical answers, and connect with influential personalities. It was a classy way of garnering an audience online, albeit with a bit of work. At the time, social media was largely used to engage with people and served as a complement to those sites. Over time though, social media became increasingly ingrained into everyone's lives and it's just easier to post a tweet or instagram post with a short caption regularly instead of writing, editing & publishing long blog posts, and for longer form content vlogs & other styles of video took off.
Still, the format has persisted in various ways especially in the tech world, with tech teams often having a team or company blog and developers using it to write about their development journey as part of this celebrated culture of sharing which thrives in the software development community. As with a lot of disruptive technologies, it didn't outright get replaced by new content formats but there are now more formats to complement each other - if only we aren't too lazy to utilize them.
There are a lot of different ways to get into blogging or writing posts now, and it's highly recommended for people in technical & creative fields, whether it's a personal site or joining a blogging platform. Here I'll share 6 reasons that I think it's a good idea to have a personal blog, which you can host yourself on a free hosting solution (usually with a free subdomain) or build with a site builder (riddled with templates and AI assisstants). Some blogging platforms will also let you use a custom domain of your choosing so it works as a personal site instead of just a subdomain on their site, while reaping all the technical benefits.
1. Freedom of expression & creativity
On your site you don't have to try to conform to any algorithm or specific format, you can use your site for writing and posting about anything from your career journey to personal moments and random ideas in one place. You might be keen on keeping it topical so that your content looks valuable to a specific audience, but either way you can organize it with tags & pages so any visitor will be able to see what's up at a glance. For this reason, site navigation is pretty important to nail.
Ultimately, a blog doesn't really need to be for anyone else, you can use it like a journal and share it or just let it sit there and refer to it when you need to. The practice of recreational writing is a mainstay in therapy and psychological research as it's been found to improve our mood, immune systems, and a healthier thought process, especially when focusing on meaning rather than a simple record of events .
2. Own your traffic
When posting your high quality content on other social & community sites you're mostly directing traffic towards those websites, not just your profile. The big platforms make it easy to get started and handle much of the marketing for you, but just as well they'll exercise their right to pull attention away from your content and onto anything else that they were paid to highlight or that's loud and exciting to get people lost in a rabbit hole. You're competing for attention at every moment, even after someone had already decided to engage with your content. If it ever happens that your account is closed, your profile lost, or the site is closed, you also lose your entire history there; all your followers, friends and posts gone.
On your site, once the stage of landing on your site is complete - and the landing page doesn't put people off or take too long to load - the visitor's mind will just be on you and what you're trying to express here. It's a different mindset between consuming scrolling content and studying an individual. Social media platforms would still serve well as a simple communication channel where you can share your highlights or questions and link to your blog, it helps make it easier to find through search engines.
A common feature of owning your traffic is also keeping track of your audience; keeping a secure mailing list of people who trust in you, associate with you, or are willing to support you is a good move, if you can treat them with care.
3. Supplement your other content
A lot of us are for the most part content with just tweeting or posting images with captions, but there are times when you want to elaborate on something or explore it in depth, or write an open letter. Instead of using a twitter thread of 20 tweets, linking to a twitlonger page or using a long chain of stories, you might use your blog or site to dive deep into the subject in isolation and link to it. You can also create a positive feedback loop between your content on different social media platforms and your site. It's likely that your social media platforms will have more traffic overall, but the people that are willing to go to your site are the cream of the crop, following you at a more personal level.
4. Archive your struggles
Not to say you should celebrate those moments you're trying to go to sleep at 3am and your brain presents to you a fine selection of the most embarrassing moments from your highschool days. This is about documenting the obstacles you've faced, especially after finally overcoming them, so you can refer to it later or someone going through the same thing can find that solution. I.e. it's not always stackoverflow that answers a dev's prayers, a lot of answers come in the form of personal blog posts (sometimes linked in a stackoverflow answer).
On social media we're incentivised to only show our good side, always comparing ourselves to other user profiles, and for the most part avoiding exposing vulnerability. In your own little corner you can be more comfortable in writing about your struggles without worrying too much about how it'll be received by random people the algorithm serves it to. By documenting our struggles as well as victories we can appear more human and paint a more natural image of our growth (albeit still a simple image).
5. Generate content ideas
Most formats on social media sites perform best as very simple & short content, so for most value-oriented content creators a single piece of long-form media can be the source of multiple posts across different platforms. Your blog post could already be drawn from a book or seminar or something, but with one detailed post you could extrapolate ideas & material for other sites; you might summarize your main point or headlines for Twitter, you might put them into a visual narrative for an Instagram carousel or talk about 1 or 2 of them at a time in a reel, you might dance on some TikToks in between writing a script based on the article for a YouTube video
You could even cross post related content, like posting web dev tutorials on Dev.to and your personal blog, or making a tutorial video and embedding it in the article along with linking from the video to the article for a different format or copyable code snippets.
6. Train your creative brain
Writing is a form of creative expression and it's a timeless skill to learn and master. Whether you're writing tutorials, letters, or stories about your life, the more you do it the better you get at it, and combined with other platforms you can learn to communicate the same ideas in different formats and with different constraints until the constraints don't really matter anymore. If you're not used to long form writing, the large space you get with a blog post itself can be a constraint.
As a wise man once said, "You don't need creativity to deal with freedom, you need creativity to deal with constraints"
Summary & conclusion
Consider these points if you're interested at all in having a personal blog site:
- Freedom of expression to write whatever you like however you like without a care for algorithms & popularity
- Own the traffic and connections that go through your site as you improve your SEO & build up an email list
- Supplement your external posts by elaborating on them or writing a letter to link people to
- Archive your learning struggles and achievement for reference
- Generate lots of content ideas by extrapolating from your own articles
- Train your writing skills as you express similar ideas in different formats, long & short
One more thing
There has been a little bit of a pushback against massive centralized social media sites being where all the action happens, although discoverability without using social media has become difficult. As people have more and more stakes and reliance on those platforms, and then those platforms make policy and feature changes that hurts existing users, it's become clear how unhealthy it is for the internet to be completely controlled by or dependant on them. Not to mention that search engines like Google were designed for a fragmented internet where your daily objective is to discover new domains and pages that are relevant to you, but due to these shifts search engines have become less reliable and social media sites don't priotize searchability, they want you to engage with a recommendation algorithm designed to take up as much of your time and attention as possible.
The growth of SEO optimization lead to a lot of low quality sites investing heavily in gaming the system to get their content ranking high on Google, poisoning the quality of search results with regurgitated or bought top 10 lists, How To's, stolen, and bot-generated content. At the same time, most of us got used to engaging with algorithmic feeds where both the consumer and content creator have to work with the algorithm, where search is not important. With a come back in decentralization and the low barrier to entry for good-looking personal websites and mini platforms, we'll probably have a resurgance of webportals or other ways of suggesting sites. Some moderns browsers already have improved ways of organizing and sharing webpages such as built-in pin boards or collections. It's interesting to see where it goes.
*Updated March 8th, 2023: edits and rewrites
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