[Part of Advent of Writing 2025]
Selfishly, I love stumbling upon someone’s blog because it gives me a glimpse of who the writer is and what they care most about. This discovery is what makes browsing the internet so fun.
There are also many positives for the writer. First of all, doing any writing, published or not, helps you work through and solidify ideas in your head. I can 100% feel the difference between explaining a raw thought to someone and one I’ve written about. It comes out so much better and clearer if I’ve gone through the process of writing about it. And with this clarity of thought, you also start to develop stronger opinions about what you are writing about. This is important in creating a deeper understanding of what interests you.
Publishing these thoughts online also gives an opportunity for engagement. There’s nothing cooler than someone reaching out because of a blog post you’ve written. Even my posts, which mostly don’t get many views, still regularly result in engagement from both friends and strangers. I’ve even met up in person with someone who read my blog because they reached out!
It’s also great to maintain a record of your thoughts because you get to see how they’ve evolved over the years. My first blog post was in 2020 about Edward Snowden’s book “Permanent Record”. Back then, privacy was the most important cause I was concerned about. Today, I still care about it, but not to the extent I did 6 years ago. But it’s easy to forget who you were without something concrete, like a blog post.
The last thing I’ll mention is the ideas themselves. Blog posts will fall into one of two categories: new ideas or old ideas. The benefits of releasing new ideas to the world are obvious. As a result, sometimes posting about old existing ideas can feel pointless. But there’s real value in reinforcing good ideas, even if it feels like common knowledge to you. Chances are, someone out there will read about it for the first time, and you were the entry point to the good idea. Even this post itself is an example of this. The benefits of maintaining a blog have been written about countless times, I’m sure. But this post might be someone’s trigger to make one, and that’s the whole point.
So make a blog if you don’t have one already! And if you do, write more for it. The benefits for you and the people who read it make it so worth it.
Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts, please email me at [email protected]. I also have a newsletter that will email whenever I have a new post. Please sign up below if you are interested.