it’s best to begin writing on a social media site that 1) already has a significant user base, 2) is relevant to your chosen category, and most importantly, 3) provides you with analytics into your target readers’ behaviors. This is where writing on your own blog, or even someone else’s website, falls short. The whole idea isn’t to just hit publish

The second scenario for starting a blog is the solopreneur, the digital marketer, the fitness coach, the individual who is less concerned with sharing his or her own individual insights and perspectives, and instead wants to use writing as a marketing mechanism for their internet business.

If you are a company with the resources to build and scale your website into an industry publication, you should start a blog. And if you are a solopreneur who wants to “own” a category or niche by creating a directory of knowledge, you should start a blog. But if you don’t fit within either of these two categories, then blogging is not your best p

At their best, blogs give an individual the chance to interact with and become part of a collective that both shapes and is shaped by his or her thoughts. Blogs, by their very nature, are tentative works in progress. They have the character of playfulness, which is core to the new culture of learning. They can be experimental in nature, used to tes

But the key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity.