How Blogging Can Help You To Reduce Stress
and Increase Personal Growth
By Mary J. Derosa
Expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing is no longer limited to journals and diaries, you can now create a blog. Blogging is an activity where anyone can enjoy it. You can either write your own articles or read other people's pieces. It’s easy and free.
Blogging does more than just keeping your memories or having self-expression outlets. It’s also good for your mental health and growth. In this article, I’ll be discussing a few of those benefits to get a gist of what blogging can do.
Anyone Can Start a Blog
Creating a blog is very easy; anyone can do it. There are three main things you need to have: a domain name, web hosting, and a website builder, or a CMS like WordPress... What is WordPress?
I’ll give you five simple steps to start:
- Choose your blog name
Once you have your blog name, you should check if the domain name for your blog is available. If the name is already taken, then you can try the next best thing provided or change the words. - Get your blog online
Next, you should pick a web hosting to get your blog online. There are plenty of affordable web hosting providers like Hostinger.com. - Create a website for your blog
Next, you can start building your website. You can use a website builder or a CMS like WordPress. They provided free and beginner-friendly templates to help you. - Make Content
After everything is set, you can start creating content for your blog. Write things that you are passionate about, you don’t need to follow other people’s writing. - Promote
You want people to know your blog, so don’t forget to promote it. There are plenty of ways to promote your blog. It can be through your inner circle or social media.
Benefits From Blogging
I’ve listed five examples of how blogging helps you...
1. Great for Reflection
When writing a new blog post, my starting point is usually thinking about what happened since the last article I wrote. This indirectly makes me reflect on what I did in the past.
Looking back is an excellent way to remind yourself what you’ve learned, accomplished, and how you reacted to certain situations. It also gives you a view of how much you’ve changed. For example, you started out creating content for fun and now you’re doing it while earning money.
You should take the time to reflect. It’s a valuable thing to do. In your spare time, look back and see what you can improve on or keep on doing.
2. Productive Venting
Blogging can be a place where you can express your thoughts and emotions that have been bottled up inside you. It’s beneficial for people who don’t want to talk about their concerns with other people.
You don’t need to think about grammar and style in the first draft. Put your thoughts onto a document and refine them later, while editing. Just post about what’s on your mind. Readers who empathize with you might respond about the ways they dealt with the issue or what outcome they had.
If you have plenty of ideas on your head, just write them down. Some readers might become interested in the ideas and would want to connect with you. Who knows, they might even help you execute the ideas.
3. Build Communities
In time, your blog will attract people and create a community where people are eager to engage with you. Some benefits of building your community are:
- Increases your popularity
- Makes your blog attractive to advertisers
- Increases page views
- Easier to have buyers on your store
- Creates user-generated content
- Becomes your support system
A healthy community can do wonders for stress relief and good mental health. Your loyal readers will most likely relate to whatever you write, so when you have issues, your community is there to support you. This can also measure your personal growth, the bigger the audience group, the better your growth is.
4. Improve Communication Skills
Blogging is one of the channels for communication. By writing blog posts, you are connecting with an audience that is eager to hear your thoughts. Blogging creates facilities for communication, such as allowing the audience to give feedback, comments, and replies without needing to meet face to face.
By that, you’ll always be communicating with people, not only by expressing yourself but also by learning other people’s points of view. Another good advantage of blogging is that the more you write, the better you’ll become at writing.
As you become experienced in blogging, you’ll find yourself expressing your emotions better and you’ll be able to describe things more clearly. Thus your writing and communication skills will become more refined.
5. You Might Earn a Buck
A little bit of extra income never hurt anyone. A blog can become a great way to earn extra money and reduce financial stress too. There are many ways to do it from your blog. Some of those ways include:
- Set up advertisements
You can place ads on your website without spending any money. A way to do that is to use Google Adsense. It’ll help you find advertisers. What you need to do is choose the types of ads you want and where to place them. Google will take care of the rest.
- Take Donations
Now if you love writing quality content and have a strong and engaged community. You can open a donation link and politely ask your readers to fund your effort. Not everyone will donate, but you just might get enough to cover your daily expenses. You can use payment processors like Paypal to help you.
Conclusion
Blogging is a great way to reduce stress and increase your personal growth. Some of the benefits are:
- Great for reflection
- Productive venting
- Build communities
- Improve communication skills
- You might earn a buck
Having a blog brings plenty of benefits to your mental health too. If you don’t have a blog yet, you should start creating one. It’s very easy. Just follow the five simple steps I made and you’re done!
So go pour your thoughts and emotions into your writing, it will help you a lot.
About the Author:Mary J. Derosa is a founder and chief editor at her digital content and SEO agency PRable. She is passionate about digital marketing innovations. The technologies and online businesses are her engines she loves to write about.