WHY BLOGGING IS THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

In this Digital/Information Age, your blog is your platform to share your ideas, passion, personal projects, products and services with the world. If you have set up website for your personal company, I congratulate you, but your company’s website is nothing but an online business card or an online boring bulleting board bereft of vibrancy and human voice and interaction. You got to set up a blog where you could relate with your customers and client directly, you need a blog which you could update by yourself without having to contact a webmaster before you update it. Welcome to do-it-yourself phase in the evolution of digital age! In years to come, working as webmaster or web designers will be outdated as many people will be able to buy domain name, buy website template, buy hosting plan and host their websites all by themselves. 

Blog is one of the social media tools, like facebook LinkedIn, Instagram, in actual fact Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. If you are self employed, your blog is your online office where people get to know what you are doing and could contact you easily if they need your service or product.

If you are an employee working for private or government establishment your blog gives you the opportunity to earn passive income by sharing information or interest you are passionate about online. If you are posting valuable unique contents in your blog, you will have huge traffic and with large visitors to your blog you will surely earn income - you will be selling advertisement spaces on your blog.

If you are a business person/an entrepreneur your blog is like you is your digital marketing platform, which will further help to promote your brand and market your product/services to the widest audience at little or no cost. You might have paid a web developer to develop your website; your customer and clients want to see the face behind the company, they want you to share your thoughts, experiences and ideas with them; they want to feel the human side of your brand. For these reasons therefore you got to set up a blog! Instead of paying digital marketing agents for ads, your blog will save you cost and help you maximize profit.

If you an accomplished investor, you have successfully transited from an entrepreneur when people work for you to an investor that have mastered how money could work for you. Your excellent level of financial success will automatically attract people who want to follow your steps and learn from you. This implies that your blog will have huge visitors. Large traffic will also fetch you extra income effortlessly.

You might still be schooling or out of school looking for job, hence you are not an employee, self-employed, entrepreneur nor an investor, so you do not belong to any these for categories.  In my opinion the fact that you did not belong to any of the four groups mentioned, implies that you need a blog more than the people we have already talked about.

Having a blog as a student will set you up on a path to future financial freedom, by the time you are done with schooling and you secure an employment, your blog that you have spent your time to nurture while in school would become matured digital asset which will be generating extra income into your pocket.

If you are done with formal education and you are yet to secure gainful employment; then blogging is the cheapest means of becoming a self-employed (Digital Entrepreneurship) and eventually an entrepreneur. The story of Linda Ikeji who became a blogger after she failed at her magazine publishing business, demonstrates that a jobless graduate could make a living as a blogger. Today as the richest blogger in Africa she has moved from being a self-employed blogger to a successful digital entrepreneur.

With her new social media network called Linda Ikeji Social (LIS) she is providing employment to many Nigerians and she is determined to compete with the facebook in social media digital sector.

In sum whatever you do, whatever is your financial status to have a person blog is to have a digital asset. An asset puts money inside your pocket; but a liability takes money from your pocket. Facebook could be a digital asset or liability depending on what you are using it for; however, having a personal blog is a digital asset, it will always put money in your pocket so far you are posting contents that people love to read; the more people you have reading your blog posts; they more money you will be able to make by blogging.

Some people have about 20,000 followers on their facebook pages yet they get nothing from facebook who usually make money from sponsored contents placed in timelines, but if you are having 20,000 views on your blog daily you will surely earn income through Google Adsense or affiliate programmes of Google, Jumia, Konga and others.

Even if you are not earning enough from Google’s enabled digital ads platforms, you could always approach companies to place ads in your blog, once you are having huge traffic, companies themselves will contact you for ad placements.

By having a personal blog your social media accounts - facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedIn and others will instantly become your digital asset instruments which you will use to popularize your blog. Social media are basically referral platforms, which will drive traffic to your blog. This is how it works, by sharing your blog posts on facebook, google+, twitter and others your friends and followers on these platforms seeing that your blog post looks interesting by seeing the title and lead image will click on the post and will instantly land on your blog.

After reading through the post they could as well share it on their social media accounts. The most important thing is to be posting unique valuable contents on your blog. These contents could be sourced elsewhere or on the net, but for ethical and legal purposes you are obliged to indicate at the foot of your post the source of what you have posted.

 
To be professional you need to indent the content you have sourced elsewhere. The same goes for images you sourced elsewhere. If you don’t acknowledge the sources/authors of contents not written by you, you have committed the offence of intellectual property theft, which is called plagiarism in the academics. 

Besides, if you recklessly cut and paste other online contents in your blog, Google may deny you opportunity of having AdSense/Affiliate ads in your blog, or may penalize you by other means. In the extreme case, Google could shut down your account (If you are using Blogger). For instance, in 2014 Google temporarily shut down Linda Ikeji's blog because of matter relating to her indiscriminate use of copy righted materials on her blog.

Blogging is the queen of social media, all other social media tools are integrated into blog and whatever you do, whatever your status: rich or poor, employed or un-employed, entrepreneur or investor, schooling or out-of-school, teacher or student, doctor or nurse, patient or care giver you need to have personal blog where you will share your: personal story, experiences, ideas, feelings, world views. This is information age, where those who share information earn money, to earn money, you got to have blogging platform. The easiest ways to create a blog is to use Blogger this is because every gmail email account automatically comes with pre-installed Blogger app.                      

                 Welcome to the future of social media!

Happy Blogging!!                  Happy Earning, by Sharing!!!