Improve Your Skills

As previously mentioned, blogging is not simply a pulpit but also a conversation starter. Your readers will generally be ruthless about inaccuracy and mistakes in your posts. Likewise, if your thoughts and ideas are flawed or can be stretched further, chances are your visitors will point it out, either on your blog itself or elsewhere online, such as Reddit, Hacker News, or Twitter.

This collaborative, if you will, aspect of blogging has the huge benefit of helping you learn and grow, thanks to the power of constructive criticism and the discussions that will ensue from your posts.

The experience of blogging regularly will enhance your writing and technical skills, help you develop your arguments, and possibly provide you with a thicker skin to handle harsh comments. It could be argued that, overall, you’ll become both a better person and a better communicator because of your blog.

The benefits derived from blogging don’t end here, though. When you’re researching a topic for an article, you’ll be doing focused learning for a specific and practical purpose (something that turns out to be very effective).

Teaching others requires a good mastery of the subject at hand. Personally, I find that teaching something highlights any shortcomings in my own knowledge on the topic at hand. If I can’t explain a concept or subject simply and effectively to others, it means that I don’t know that topic well enough yet myself.

Sometimes you’ll have ideas or assumptions in your head that are nebulous because you haven’t formalized them or fully thought them out. As soon as you start to make your case in an article, you may find out that those ideas were misguided, flawed, or weak. Or, on the flip side, it may turn out that they are remarkable and worthy of sharing at large.

Either way, blogging can help clarify, streamline, and spread your thoughts further, all with the help of your audience. So not only do you get to be a teacher who helps others, but you grow and learn much in the process as an individual.

Communication and well-defined ideas are at the heart of most professions. So if you’re a programmer, blogging really stands to make you a better programmer. If you’re a CEO, blogging can make you a better businessperson. Focus your writing on what you want to improve on and not just on what you know best.

Blogging can be a useful way to remember things you’ve learned but since forgotten, help you look up snippets of code from the past, and/or share technical information with a small group of friends or colleagues. I have occasionally Googled for something and found the answer in an old post of mine—a fun experience were it not for the nagging suspicion that I may have become dumber than my previous self. ;)

Finally, some technical bloggers take a political approach to their blogging. They blog because they feel so strongly about their ideas that they want to convince others to believe in the same principles, with the ultimate goal of improving the field they work in.