Blogging. It may seem like a strange, far off land, or a foreign concept. Maybe you think that you don’t have it in you to blog, but you’d like to try. Or maybe you’ve been seeing a lot blogs pop up–especially if you’re in university and all your friends are studying abroad. It’s not that difficult to set one up these days, especially with all the free platforms available (weebly, blogger, and wordpress, just to name a few), and with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can set one up. Then all that’s left to do is write. This is the difficult part–deciding your content. That may have you asking the question, why even have a blog to begin with? The simplest answer is why not? Why not have a blog? But if that doesn’t do it for you, there are plenty of other reasons.
One of the most common reasons that I’ve seen blogs start up is for travel. People are taking a gap year, or studying abroad for a semester, or are about to embark on a summer full of travel, and want to keep their friends and families updated on their adventures. So they start a blog. It’s an easy way to keep people updated, since it’s a central location–you don’t have to send out fifty different emails to fifty different people, you can just direct them to your blog. And since most places have internet, it’s a lot cheaper than sending out snail mail, and a lot less time consuming.
Blogging is also a way to showcase your work. Many photographers have blogs where they post their photography, and a lot of cooking and crafting enthusiasts will start blogs to showcase their work and give tutorials. But don’t feel limited to cooking and crafting–if you’re very knowledgeable about any subject (PR, sailing, technology, just to name a few off the top of my head) why not start a blog and share your knowledge?
And if you’re too lazy to journal or keep a diary, a blog is a great way to get your thoughts out of your head and stored for later, so that one day, you can come back to your blog, and see what the you five years ago was thinking about. Writing your thoughts and actually putting them into words can be quite cathartic, and you may find that if you share those words, that you are not the only one who feels or thinks the same way.
Essentially, no matter what you do with your blog, it all boils down to sharing your words with other people; whether it’s words about travel, a topic you know a lot about, or just the thoughts in your head, blogging is a great way to connect with each other.