I used to read posts from people like Michael Hyatt and Jeff Goins and Frank Viola about how everyone should start a blog and I thought they were a stretch.  But, after blogging for about 3 years I couldn’t agree with them more. Below are seven reasons that almost everyone should consider building their own home base on the web:

1. You or your business or your ministry have a message to share with the world and it is longer than a 2 sentence Facebook post or a 140 character tweet.
2. Your message and those who are listening to it deserve a well-built platform that you own and that you control and that people enjoy connecting with.
3. Blogging gives you the routine and discipline of sitting down and creating something routinely. This is a powerful habit.
4. Blogging helps you to work through what is inside your inner man, it helps you to craft your core message.  Even if no one is reading what you write, this benefit to you is reason enough to blog.
5. Blogging gives you a voice, some of us need that voice, some of us need to be heard, some of us can help people and a blog give us a platform to speak.
6. Blogging can provide a place where you can generate a stream income, whether it is launching a book you just wrote or it is selling a favorite book or favorite toys made by someone else through affiliate links, there are hundreds of ways to make money on a blog.
7. If you have a business then a blog can provide a place to find new leads and even to better communicate with employees.
8. It is wise to build on owned space on the net not rented space so that you can control what your followers, your web traffic see, take care of your followers and they will take care of you. Facebook, free blogging sites and other people’s blogs are rented space. Pay for hosting and you wont regret it.

Jeff Goins also wrote about this topic recently here.

If we have time for hours on Facebook or twitter or other people’s blogs a week then we have time to create our own blog.  There is no better way to reach large numbers of people around us than to create our own blog site linked to social media.

You can build a site for free or you can build a self-hosted (you own it) good-looking site in a few hours for ~$100 – $200.

Start creating something, start sharing the gifts that are inside rather than consuming everyone else’s.

There is a lot of ‘real estate’ still available on the web, when will you start building? I enjoy helping people with this, comment below or email me at collierak@me.com and I will help if you don’t know where to begin.

If you want to get started with your site please go to bluehost (affiliate link).