Location, Location, Location
The most important consideration in buying real estate is its location.
The saying goes. Well, that’s true. But not only of real estate. The same is true for someone selling hot food out of a van in a lay-by. Pick a bad lay-by: make no money. pick a good one: prosper. It’s common sense. Writing on someone else’s platform intranet is like being a market trader. Competing with all the other traders in the market (not necessarily for money, more for attention). But there aren’t any customers there. It’s just other traders. Having your own blog is like being in a lay-by, on your own. It’ll take you a while to find out if you picked a good lay-by (and are providing good food)!
Got something to say write? Start your own blog. Get a domain name, get a VPS, pick a static site generator (there are lots).1 Spend a day figuring things out, start blogging.
But, we’ve got Facebook, Linkedin, Tiktok, X etc now!
No. The owners of those intranets have them. Not you. You are a user. You are a product. Ever read the terms and conditions? Unlikely. Ever tried moving all of your content from their platform to somewhere else? Good luck with that. Even the latest darling for professional writers, Substack, has quite a few terms you’ll need to agree to. Don’t forget to read the Publisher Agreement as well!
Your House, Your Rules
When you run your own blog, you’re in charge. You’re an author, an editor, a proof reader. Oh, and a researcher. Maybe a photographer, too. That’s a lot of transferable skills you’re going to get better at. Want to write a post about something that you’re pretty sure is of no interest to anyone but you? Do it. You might be surprised when it gets some views.
Searchability
Let’s try an experiment. Let’s search for something on the internet. Hmmmm. Ok, I’ve got one:
- best laptop to buy
1st result: Techradar (a blog)
The rest of the first five pages of results (I got bored) is dominated by blogs, with a few shopping sites and legacy media sites. Reddit appears as the first result in the discussions and forums section.
Note: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Tiktok…
Nothing. At. All.
What’s that you say? Try something not involved with buying something? Good point. I’ll try again…
- What is the purpose of life
I’m sure the social media plaforms are bursting at the seams with philosophers, gurus, genuises etc.
Nope.
Blogs, wikipedia, Quora (forum), religious blogs (to be expected) dominate.
Note: To be fair, a linkedin page2 was near the bottom of the first page, and they had a second result on the second page. I also tried on bing.com. Same dismal failure as on Google.
But you can see that the social media silos (generally) don’t return results on the internet. That’s because they’re not really on the internet. They’re actually intranets:
From Wikipedia
An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.
Longevity
I was quite surprised a few months ago when I got an email from a reader about a post I’d written three years before (most emails I receive are within a few weeks / months of a post). You don’t get that on Facebook, do you? There’s so much stuff flying around, it’s hard to remember what was posted yesterday, let alone last week.
When you have your own blog, that’s what happens. You write a post about something that’s on your mind and forget about it. At some point in the future, someone else has that same topic in mind, searches for it, and lands on your post. Everything is a lot more relaxed. No urgency. Ever.
Skill Development
I’ve already mentioned this earlier, but I think it warrants it’s own section (especially for younger people).
Starting and maintainig a blog requires a number of skills:
- Being able / willing to write
It doesn’t need to be perfect. You can just write as you wish. One of my favourite novels ever is The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Here are tho opening few paragraphs:
He’s written the book in the style of someone not particularly well educated. It doesn’t matter. The book is still fantastic.
- Being able to organise your time effectively
When you have your own blog, you’re going to need to manage your time. Maybe you want to write one post / article a week. Maybe one every day. On the other hand you may be like me, and sometimes write two or three posts in one day, then silence for months.
Whatever your style, you’re still going to eventually have to sit down and put pen to paper fingers on keyboard. That means forgoing watching a bit of TV or YouTube, gaming, tiktoking, or whatever else gobbles up your free time (and gives you nothing in return).
The Never Ending Project
I’ve long been an advocate of always having projects on the go. Whether that be learning something new, such as a new language, programming, how to draw etc. Running your own blog will mean you’ll always have something to do. Writing a new article, updating an old one, fixing a mistake, tweaking your theme / layout. You’ll never, ever, have nothing to do once you start blogging!
Even if you can’t thing of anything to write, you can write about that. Or, take a break from writing and take some photos and upload an article titled something like: A Trip to Cannock Chase. Why not? Doing something is better than doing nothing.
In the Old Days
In the early days of the web, their were sites, forums, blogs. That was it, pretty much. Everyone knew how important the web would become. I’ve owned the domain simonharrison.net since 2002. Back in the day I had a blog. Then, for some reason, I didn’t (I forget why). Many people forgot about blogging. Went onto a plaform that made everything easier. Became more concerned with likes and shares than value. Or, just went on the internet when they needed to, as a tourist. Well, that ease made them untold billions of dollars and made you inept at having your own home on the internet (erm, what’s a VPS?). Correct that error in 2025.
What’s the Point?
This blog is not about making money. Not made a penny and don’t plan on making a penny from it. I don’t have analytics set up. I did but decided that it didn’t matter if I get one visitor a month, or one million. I have things to say occasionally and I write a post. Sometimes I get an email from a happy reader thanking me for a tutorial post. Sometimes I get an email from an old friend who randomly searched for my name, surprised that I was the first result. Sometimes I get an email from someone responding to a post asking for more information.
That is why I do this and why you should too. Welcome to the long tail of the internet…
Getting Started
Well, you’ve got lots of choices! Fundamentally, they boil down to choosing between self hosting or using a platform. I’m not a big fan of “platforms”, but when it comes to blogging, they do make getting started much easier.
On the other hand, if you decide to host your own blog, you’ll have full control over every aspect of it. They do come at the cost of a steeper learning curve though.
You’ll have to decide whether to use a static site generator such as Pelican, Hugo, Jekyll, or a database driven one, like Worpress. One that is sort of in between, and I used many years ago is Grav. It doesn’t use a database, but does require PHP.
As I wrote in another post, for those people just wanting to have a go at blogging and see if they enjoy it, you can’t really get any easier than Blogger.com.
Updates
2025-01-10: Add never ending project section.
2025-01-04: Add getting started section.
2024-12-30: Add skill development section.
2024-12-28: Add searchability section.
Footnotes
1 Just be thankful you aren’t writing all HTML by hand, then FTP’ing to your ~10MB slice of someone’s server on a dialup connection.
2 These pages are ones that the linkedin intranet allows you to set as publicly viewable.
