I built my first blog somewhere around the year 2002. Ever since, I’ve been blogging on and off but since 2018 I’ve been blogging regularly, and since 2020 I’ve been aiming to write and publish something every week.
In You should start a blog today, I wrote about the main reasons why I think you should start a blog and I’ve been speaking in events especially about why software developers should blog as I’ve gotten so much out of it. Explaining it helps you understand it is a good starting point.
On a first glance, blogging can seem a bit solitary activity, I think it can be a very social and communal at best. Blogging events like IndieWeb Carnival and Blaugust are great ways to participate in a discussion. You can have discussions about topics through blog posts by referencing each other’s work and at the same time, spread awareness of other blogs. There are also blogger communities (like Blaugust’s Discord server) where people share ideas and help each other out.
What should you write about? Anything! That’s the beauty of blogs. Having your own blog means you’re in charge of what you want to write and publish. Some people choose a niche and focus on that to build a readership interested in a given topic. Others, like me, write about anything and everything that passes through their minds.
I used to struggle with that a bit in the past but like many have written about, it’s a perfectly good choice to not write for a niche. Rach Smith’s To be whole is the goal, Nat Eliason’s Be Yourself, Not a Niche and Roy Tang’s You Can Write About Anything explore this topic. I’ve recently become more vocal advocate for this thinking.
Blogging is a nice way to establish an online presence — if that’s something you like to have. I had a brief discussion on the blogosphere with Kev Quirk who started the discussion in Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media? and I replied to and shared my additional points in Why a personal site rather than social media presence?. In a nutshell, I like the permanence and long tail availability of blog posts compared to fast moving social media, getting rid of the middle man of social media platforms and putting your thoughts in a place that’s accessible to people without having to sign up to commercial platforms. This discussion was continued by Jason in A Personal Site Versus Social Media and Dave in Re: Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media? who both shared great points.
Another great take on this is Chris Zukowski’s Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdom. While his perspective is for video game marketing, the principles apply to blogging spot on as well. He writes about building an audience and why doing that on “other people’s kingdom” — ie. a platform you don’t control — is bad because you’re giving up any direct means of managing your readership and reaching out to them and risk losing it all if a platform decides to cut you off. Social media platforms can be great for reach but you should always still have your home base and a way to reach out to your people by means you control. See Own your content for more articles.
Once you have your blog, RSS is a beautiful technology to let others follow you without having to create any accounts. It cuts the social media algorithms out of the way and lets your readers directly subscribe to new posts. While it’s not as mainstream popular as it used to be in its heyday, there are a lot of people who use it to follow blogs and since pretty much all blogging platforms and tools make it relatively straightforward to turn on for your blog, you should definitely do that. I wrote about why I like it in what does it feel like to read RSS feeds?.
If you don’t want to start by building your own website, I’ve written about service options in blogging platforms. Since writing is the biggest bottleneck, it can make sense to start blogging on such a platform, keep local backups (this is very important!) and if possible, have your own domain so you can switch to custom platform without losing your readers.