Should we leave Social Media and start blogging?

I have wanted to write this article to argue the benefits of owning your own blog. Even though blogging is currently considered to be out of style and, it's better to publish your content on YouTube or some other social media sites or start a podcast. These are all things I might try at some point.

But all have one major failing: the platforms are owned by someone else; what happens if they go out of business tomorrow or you no longer want to publish on that site due to your own moral code, as I have recently done with Twitter?

But if you write a blog and self-host it on your own domain, you don’t have to worry about any of those things.

I have hosted my blog ctnet.co.uk using WordPress, and it has been one of the best decisions I have made, even if I have yet to make any money. It has acted as a catalyst for myself, allowing me to grow as a person and start a fresh journey of discovery.

The value of owning your content

As I stated in the introduction, when you own your domain like I do with CTNET.co.uk, I own the platform and the content I publish. My content isn’t sitting on someone else’s domain, which could be removed on someone else's whims.

It could be argued that my content will be lost in a sea of content ignored by the search engine algorithms, and there is some validity to this argument. However, the same is true for most other social media platforms, all of which have their own algorithm, and Google is the biggest search engine and the gatekeeper to the World Wide Web. Rather, this will continue to be the case in the future as personal artificial intelligence assistants evolve, but that is a topic for another article.

But most importantly, I can publish the content I want to publish on CTNET. I control the editorial guidelines and feel a real sense of ownership and purpose for what I write on my website compared to the tweets I have posted over the years.

I’m only publishing unrelated CTNET content on Medium as I haven’t yet launched another domain for my other content, but I want to share it now. So, for now, I will continue to publish on Medium.

Blogging For Personal Growth and Development

The most significant benefit of writing, which I discovered after launching CTNET, is that when you write, you must process your thoughts as you change them into an abstract pattern of a written language. This process can improve your understanding of what you are writing and help you learn. It forces you to think.

I have written about this before, but while writing a blog post on whether Information overload was killing our knowledge golden age. As I wrote, I changed my thinking, as I could see the weakness in my arguments. It was like having a dialogue with myself through the written word.

That is why I enjoy the process of writing so much; it helps me learn and grow as a person. And if someone else gets something out of that post, it's a win-win.

Conclusion

If you want to build a community, you need to have a domain you call your own, which no one else can take away from you.

You might be wondering why I’m publishing this on Medium. After all, I’m publishing it on a domain owned by others. The simple fact is that I like the Medium platform, and I’m not yet ready to launch a non-CTNET blog.

I would love to know what your thoughts are on this.

Further reading

The article Should We All Be Blogging Now.