10 Reasons Every Freelance Writer Should Have a Blog

I took to blogging fairly quickly and I finally figured out why.

I wrote a weekly newspaper column for more than five years. After that, I wrote a weekly column for Reuters, the financial wire service, for seven years. After a dozen years, writing something once a week – or more – was so second nature that when I stopped working to take care of my kids, I kept writing weekly columns. It’s just that for a time, my “weekly column” was the weekly email update for my oldest kids’ summer swim team. Then it was the weekly report for my son’s middle-school football team. Then it was a weekly newsletter for a charity group my daughter and I belonged to. It didn’t really matter what I was writing about, I was writing.

When I went back to work, I had to get acquainted with the technical aspects of blogging. But on the writing end of things I was good. Because really, I’d never stopped.

All of this is a round about way of saying, if you’re a writer, you need to write, and one of the best ways to practice is a blog. If you blog, it gets you into the habit of writing often. It’s like playing the piano. The more you practice, the faster you get better. The more you write, the faster you get better.

That’s reason No. 1 freelance writers should have a blog. Having a blog can also help you:

Create a Website – Sign up with a free blog hosting site like WordPress (what I use), TypePad or Blogger, and for nothing more than your email address, you get an online home for your resume, bio and clips as well as a blog.

Establish a beat - Whether it’s the 2008 presidential campaign, animal rescue or vegan cooking, blogging about a particular subject can help you stay on top of interesting trends and developments in a specific field, information that you can use for queries and assignments.

Practice different writing styles – If you normally writing in one style, you can use your blog to practice different styles or voices. If you normally write straight news stories for business or trade magazines, use your blog to practice writing opinion pieces, personal essays or comedy bits. If you’re comfortable writing in different styles and genres for yourself, it’s not much of a stretch to pitch those types of stories to potential clients.

Become an expert – If you blog on a specific topic long enough, you can develop an expertise that’s so attractive editors will come looking for you – or at least that’s the hope. You might also draw conference organizers looking for speakers and like-minded writers who want to network. Which leads to….

Make connections – Your blog can be a calling card to introduce yourself to writers, editors and other people in your field. Since I wrote about blogs for writers, a bunch of writers whose blogs I mentioned have asked to put me in their blogrolls and I’m doing likewise. Bingo, instant community.

Interact with readers – When you write for magazines or newspapers, you don’t always get the chance to interact directly with readers. Some publications still don’t run writers’ email addresses with stories and others run a generic address for all letters to the editors. On a blog there’s no barrier between you and your readers, so you can respond to whatever they have to say, which could lead to more things to write about.

Improve your skills – As publications move from paper to the Web, writers have to follow. You don’t need to know everything there is to know about coding HTML, but you should know a little. That goes for podcasts, social networks and other Web-based software too.

Get instant gratification - Send a story idea to a magazine editor and it might take weeks or months to hear back. Seeing a story in print can take even longer. On a blog, you get an idea, do some research, write it, hit the “Publish” button, and there it is, your thoughts for the world to see.

Make money – Although many writers use blogs purely for marketing and networking purposes, some have turned them into money-making ventures. They sell ad space through Google AdSense or sign up for the Amazon Associates program, or use the space to sell self-published books, e-books, webinars, podcasts and related services. You may find that you like blogging so much you want to look for freelance blogging gigs, which you can find on sites like ProBlogger and BloggerJobs.

Other writer/bloggers have weighed in on this subject. You can read their reasons why writers should have blogs here, here and here.