The following is a guest post by Srinivas Rao.
As I’ve started to prepare for my first speech to current students at the MBA program I recently graduated from, I started to brainstorm reasons for them to be open to the idea of starting a blog. As I looked back over the last several months and watched this great video by Matt, I realized that running blog gives you a great opportunity to develop certain essential skills for business success.
8 KEY SKILLS LEARNED FROM BLOGGING
Leadership: No matter how you look at it, if you are running a blog you are leading people. If you accept guest posts on your blog, this is a perfect example of developing leadership skills. You have to reach out to people, hold them accountable, and get them to deliver. To add to all this, they’re not even getting paid most of the time. The fact that you are developing an ability to get people who are not getting paid to help you is a tremendously valuable way to develop yourself as a leader.
Teamwork: I’ve said before that blogging is a team sport. The future of this business is collaboration. Even as an individual blogger you are running a team of people. Every time somebody writes a guest post on your blog, retweets one of your posts, or plugs you in any way, they have become a part of your team and you are a part of theirs. Gordie Rogers has done an excellent job turning his readers into a team by making them regular contributors to his site.
Marketing: If you can market yourself with little to no resources then you can easily go into a company that gives you a budget and market their products. The fact that you can build an audience and build a following is a strong demonstration of your marketing abilities and it will translate into so many areas in your career.
Time Management/Operations: Another great skill that running a blog teaches you is time management. I recently wrote a post called how to write a blog post in 20 minutes or less. Time management, efficiency and operations are going to be essential skills as your blog grows or your climb the ladder in the corporate world. Leaders are extremely proficient with time management and little time goes to waste.
Creativity: This is one of my personal favorite aspects of blogging. Creativity is really something you can’t put a price on. Too often in a typical corporate job, things become so routine that you don’t get a chance to think outside of the box. When you run a blog you are constantly being forced to come up with new ideas. This keeps the creative part of your brain going. That is why it doesn’t surprise me anymore that people figure out a way to get to what they want after the first year of blogging.
Strategic Planning/Decision Making: At the end of the day, you get to play CEO when you are a blogger. It’s your job to come up with strategic plans and make decisions. Again, this is a skill that will be essential in the working world.
Finance: Once you start making money off your blog and it truly does become a business, you are now the CEO and CFO of your blog. It’s likely you will keep financial records and keep track of everything you do. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive income does a great job of this in his monthly income report.
Networking: It’s known fact the network you have is tremendously powerful. You are as powerful as the people you surround yourself with. Fortunately blogging gives you an opportunity to surround yourself with some really smart people who can teach you quite a bit.
At the end of the day, even if you don’t have any desire to become a digital nomad or entrepreneur, starting a blog allows you to develop a wide set of essential business and career skills. So, START YOUR BLOG TODAY.