8 Reasons Why Designers Should Blog

Maintaining an active design blog has been one of the best professional decisions I ever made. I feel that every designer could greatly benefit from running blog and below is a list of reasons why. Please feel free to comment and add to the list.

1. Increased exposure
Cinnamon Creative gets far more exposure as a result of this blog than it would from any other method (outside of spending a sizable amount on advertising). There’s obviously no shortage of designers and design firms out there and the blog is an excellent way of driving traffic to my main portfolio site.

2. The learning experience
Writing new blog posts constantly builds your knowledge and abilities as a designer, and if you are researching or experiencing this stuff anyway (which is often the case), it takes hardly any extra time at all to package it into a blog and share your knowledge or create a discussion.

3. Networking
Whether you design for a firm or whether you freelance from home, networking with other designers, SEOs, marketers, and potential clients comes easily through a blog. It's a forum for a natural exchange of ideas.

4. Helps clients to find you
A blog can bring potential clients to you in a number of ways. They could come to your site through search engines, through social media, or through a link to one of your posts. They could even be one of your subscribers that follow you on a regular basis. Publishing a popular blog will bring plenty of new people to your site that can potentially turn into new business.

5. Improved content on your site for search engines
As I just mentioned, potential clients may find your site through search engines. With a blog you will have far more pages indexed than you would otherwise, and it is likely to be fresh content that covers a variety of design-related topics and draws search traffic for a much greater number of keywords and phrases.

6. Demonstrate your knowledge
When prospective clients visit your blog they will be able to see that you are an insightful, intelligent designer - it creates the impression (whether true or false!) that you actually know what you're talking about. While a portfolio can demonstrate your creative and technical design abilities, a blog will allow you to put that knowledge into writing and go a step further towards showing clients that you are the one for the job.

7. Potential promotion when needed
Once you have built up a decent number of subscribers you will have the ability to promote your work to an interested audience. If you are having a quiet period, you could publish a blog post that announces a short-term discounted price to your blog readers, for example. Rather than spending considerable time and money to find a new project you may be able to get quick results by simply reaching out to those who subscribe.

8. Variety of work
One of the nice things about blogging is that it can break up the working day / week. Whilst we creatives obviously enjoy designing, sometimes it's nice to mix in a bit of writing too.

What’s your experience? Please share your thoughts and add to the conversation.