If you're reading this blog and wondering whether or not you should start your own blog, ask yourself one question: Why blog? Here are 8 reasons I've collected for why people - myself included - are blogging.

1. Build credentials. Openly display your knowledge on a particular topic, in the hopes of impressing a future boss or a client.
2. Educate people in a particular area of interest, just because.
3. Promote a product, service, or e-book by writing about related matters, or offering regular excerpts.
4. Increase the Google page rank of your main website. Having good, fresh content may bring in links from sites with higher page ranks. This will pay off the next time Google recalculates page ranks. This is done about every 2-3 months. I went from no rank (because all my sites were new) in the summer to 3-5 for all 20 or so of my blogs and websites. While that's not 7-10, it's a start.
5. Increase your search engine rankings by producing fresh, regular, targeted and optimized content. The search engines love blogs. And there are blog-specific engines and directories. The more often you post a blog entry and "ping" these engines and directories, the more visible your posts are in the blogosphere, nay the Internet in general.
6. Make a website "sticky". That is, have a reason for readers to come back regularly. While many blogs could just as well have been set up as a regular website, anyone who can manage to regularly (read "daily") produce new, niche-specific and useful content is going to eventually develop a loyal readership. And isn't that what every webmaster or web marketer dreams of?
7. Distribute regular news articles or summaries for an area of interest. (Although this reason usually is connected to one of the other reasons listed here.)
8. Earn revenue by displaying ads relevant to your blog content. Some people are earning more than any job they might otherwise have.

In fact, some people blog for any and all of the above reasons. If I've missed any reasons, please feel free to drop me a comment.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com/

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