Ten Reasons To Blog Everyday

I want to become a copywriter, so it’s an obvious choice for me. Start my own blog and polish my skills as a writer in the process.

It also motivates me to read more books, which I've decided to summarise alongside writing blogs.

For you, it may be different.

You may not have a clear and obvious reason that motivates you enough to get started.

You might feel like you’ve got something to say – or it may be the reverse. You know that it would be good for your career, but you can’t find ideas or inspiration to write.

I recommend you should write a blog every day.

Yes, every day.

Why?

This is from my personal experience.

I’ve blogged on-and-off for ten years, and since I started doing it every day, I barely noticed improvement and benefit. Certainly not to the extent I have outlined them below. These have been the benefits of blogging daily.

 You force yourself to come up with interesting ideas

This has been a great factor for me.

I am in the world of ideas: advertising.

Having to come up with new ideas on a weekly basis to continue to add fuel to the fire to our campaigns, there must be some kind of process you undertake.

It’s not just guesswork.

When you write every day, you come up with your own personal ways to generate interesting ideas.

You might keep a swipe file of good ideas to bounce off of.

You might read more books for new ways of thinking and ideas you can explore in your work.

You might even go outside for a walk and look for some inspirational in the world.

Whatever it is, you develop a pattern for yourself.

This becomes a habit. Ideas start to come to you naturally.

How will this help you?

If you’re a lawyer, you have to come up with new ideas on how to battle your client’s cases every day.

If you’re a manager, you have to act at the moment to ensure the effective running of your team.

If you are a business owner, instinctively you must come up with new ideas to grow the business.

If you’re a mother, you have to come up with ideas to encourage your children.

Coming up with new ideas on a daily basis for your writing carries enormous benefits.

You become a better problem-solver. A better innovator. A better communicator.

It’s the equivalent of writing six books a year

The average non-fiction book is no longer than 50,000 – 75,000 words.

If you write a 1000 word blog every day for the year, that’s at least five books worth of material.

If that’s not enough to impress you, I don’t know what is.

Imagine writing six books a year.

Who publishes sixty books over the space of a decade?

I don’t think it’s been done. Not to my knowledge. I could Google it to find out, but I refuse to use Google mid-article.

There’s a reason I don’t search the internet before I write, it keeps the work original.

Back to the topic at hand: writing six books a year.

Not even the greatest writers of all time produced so much work. You can bet they were all prolific, though.

Take a note from their book: write a lot. Like six-books-a-year-a-lot.

A thousand words today could get you started.

It becomes easier each time

Have you noticed that as you do something, it becomes easier and you tend to get better at it?

It’s the same with writing.

At first, there is a lot to think about – the topics you are going to address, your writing style and tone of voice, how to structure your articles into a logical sequence.

Once you’ve learned the basics and have a handful of topics to choose from to write about, it all falls into place.

You develop a process. And it begins to work.

Then you can evaluate that process.

It’s like cooking a meal. The first time you try, it is bland and tasteless. Or you may have put too much seasoning on it, and it’s overpowering.

Continue to cook and soon enough, you’re skilled enough that you can experiment with new recipes and conjure up all sorts of meals for yourself. And they start to taste better.

It’s the same with writing.

You can write. But if you started to write daily, naturally you will improve.

You add new ingredients and recipes to spice up your writing and make it tastier, experimenting with different writing styles and techniques.

But until you start writing, you haven’t even begun to clean the oven – forget about finding the right ingredients.

Try it: write a blog a day for 30 days. Tell me the 30th blog you write was harder than the first.

It’s like saying if you go to the gym for a month and lift weights, would the 10lb weight feel lighter on the 30th day, or heavier?

The weight would be minuscule on the 1000th day at the gym in comparison to the first.

In fact, the weight you started with on the 1st day will feel so minuscule by the 1000th day, you wouldn’t dream of picking it up. It wouldn’t even build muscle, not if you did a million reps of them.

Imagine the 1000th blog.

How much easier would that be that the first? Write a blog every day for three years, and you’ll see.

Less self-critique and more self-evaluation

You write a blog today. It sucks.

And tomorrow, you write a blog. It will suck.

But guess what? The day later, you can write another one. And that will suck.

If we gave up at something every time we weren’t good at it, we would never get good at anything.

If you continue to write, one day you will write a blog that doesn’t suck.

By removing the self-critique, and realizing that every day you get to start fresh.

A new blog. A new chance to write. A new technique to use in your writing.

Whatever the case may be, blogging lets you ‘act it out’ – you write, edit, then publish.

You do it to the best of your ability.

And then you get to go back and do it again.

There’s nothing wrong with evaluating your work every couple of months, but we need to check our self-critique and self-evaluation at every stage of the way.

If you don’t do this when you are bad at it, you will never get a chance to be good.

There’s an infinite number of ways to improve as a writer. And therefore there are infinite ways to evaluate your work. The way you evaluate your work should relate to why you write and what it is you’re trying to accoplish.

I want to become a better writer. I look at:

• Writing style
• Sentence structure
• Writing for the audience
• Being more thorough in my descriptions
• Applying more stories to my writing

Why are you writing? How do you want to get better?

Stop it with the critique, and start with the writing.

After six months, evaluate where you are now with where you began.

There won’t be much improvement in six months.

But over the space of two years, you will see a dramatic improvement.

After five years, you’ll be a mastermind.

My work from 2018 makes me cringe.

Why?

Because I know my work right now is so much better.

Should I have put them out?

Yes.

They are all me at my best.

They are all me writing at my current standard – for the time they were published, that’s all I had in me.

Without writing those, I couldn’t have become the writer I am today.

And without writing and publishing today, I won’t become the writer I know I can be in the future.

I’m not the perfect writer. I know that.

But I know that I’m getting better. And that’s all that matters.

Look at each piece of work is just a practice run for the next one.

Your thoughts become more original

The fact is, nobody is truly original.

We are all a product of the society and times we live in.

We all have access to the same resources and information.

Was Steve Jobs ‘original’?

Or did he take ideas that already exist, and fuse them together to create something more powerful and attention-grabbing in those times?

Would anyone care if somebody came along with a new phone that they called ‘smart’? Simply a phone that merged your phone and music player.

No.

Steve did it ten years ago.

The point?

As you write, you do become more original in your thought, but only because you start to combine ideas that already exist.

The better and more critically you can look at things, and the more time you spend thinking about them, the more thorough your ideas will be.

And hence, the more original they will be.

Nobody has the same experience, so in some sense, we are all ‘original’.

But we all live in the same world. And a lot of things have already been done.

Remember that each of those innovations built on the great ideas before them. Nobody just simply plucks great ideas from the sky like the feathers off a chicken.

They are formulated over years, often with the decades or centuries proceeding them offering valuable insight into the subject matter at hand before any breakthrough is ever made.

Your ideas could be like that.

And as they compound, who is to say that you don’t come up with something that is truly unique and original, or formulate an idea that is well-researched and offers insight into a field that nobody else has discovered yet?

You thoughts become more concise

As you write about your thoughts on subjects, you are teaching yourself to think more concisely.

You ask yourself questions that make you a more critical and rational thinker:

What am I writing about?

What are the key points?

How does this apply to real-world situations?

How could this help my audience?

Further considering your thoughts and new ideas you’ve been reading as you write, this helps you think more concisely.

It feels that I am cementing the knowledge I’ve acquired into my subconscious, literally influencing how I see the world. It also allows me to have new perspectives on old knowledge.

Your writing becomes sharper

Do you want to become a better writer?

Then you better write.

That’s the reason I started this blog – to sharpen my skills. And I must say, it is working. My work is becoming more precise, better written and the structure is improving dramatically.

It’s easier to sit and write a personal blog than anything else. There’s really no rules. It’s all good fun, just start writing about your interests.

If you are a little further ahead, you can get tips from across the web on exercises on how to produce great blogs.

Perhaps I will put together some guides in the near future – but for now, I’m writing about my personal viewpoints and experiences.

I’m new to the world of advertising. And I need to fit all the time I can into writing.

You don’t have to be so excessive, one long-form blog a week is enough to get better over time if you are more placid about your writing skills.

I do believe that the ability to articulate your thoughts in the written form is a powerful skill for anyone to have.

Attract new opportunities

Writing a blog can attract new opportunities for many of you.

For those establishing themselves in copywriting or advertising such as myself, it is quite clear as to why it would help.

But what about if you’re training to become an accountant, lawyer or any other profession?

I have one question for you if you doubt it will bring you opportunities:

Do you think when you go for an interview or apply for a job online, that a website showcasing your expertise and thought process in your area of expertise won’t help you?

The simple fact remains that we are in a heavily competitive global marketplace.

You have to differentiate yourself if you want to attract the best opportunities.

And a blog will help you do so.

You remember new knowledge a lot easier

When you are writing blogs, whatever you read and consume you tend to want to write about.

I will give you an example.

You read a book, retaining many of the key points.

If I asked you about the key point in three weeks times, would you remember the details, or just the quirky and most memorable ideas?

Now consider this.

If you’ve written about the principles within those three weeks and reflected upon them in your blog, would you expect yourself to be able to explain the points more coherently?

Would you perhaps even know how it affects the principles of your work, and how you can apply it to the real world?

You have considered the point and put it into context within your writing, clarifying your understanding of the concept.

That means when you go to the memory bank, it’s no longer faint words on a page you’ve read.

It’s a full paragraph that you’ve written and published. It’s a phrase (or idea) you’ve had to read back to yourself, edit and publish online.

Isn’t that much more powerful than reading a couple of lines in a book and trying to explain it to someone?

It builds a great habit

Writing is an excellent habit.

The possibilities are endless.

It gets you creating.

It gets you thinking more deeply on an everyday basis.

It increases your focus.

When I first started, I would struggle to write for fifteen minutes.

I can now write for a sustained one-hour period quite easily.

How?

I’ve built it into my habits.

I plan ‘writing time’ in advance.

That means I can formulate my ideas throughout the week and have chunks of time set aside to write.

You will also find that habits stack.

Since I started writing more blogs, I’ve also read four times as many books than I usually would – from one a month to one book a week.

I truly believe writing blogs has been a transformational step in my life.

It’s taught me that in time I can become great.

It’s taught me that I can put in the work.

It’s taught me that I can focus, only if I want it bad enough.

And it’s taught me that in due time, I will become great.