Why

I’m a firm believer in the “why” of things. The why is often more important than the how. Find your why, and the how will become significantly easier to tackle and endure.

People are also significantly more inclined to follow, believe, and buy your why. What you do – and how you do it – simply becomes a consequence of your why.

If you’re a company, and your why/purpose is clearly outlined for your employees, you’ll also find that their productivity and commitment stand to be far greater.

You’ll want to start with the why, working in a top down approach that will lead you to decide which actions needs to be taken as a consequence of your core motivations and values.

Okay, so how do we apply this to blogging? Simply stated, we must ask what the why is at multiple levels.

WHY you blog

Let’s start with your reason for wanting to blog.

For example, take into consideration this very blog.

Q: Why TechnicalBlogging.com?

A: Because I believe blogging is a useful tool that can aid many students and professionals in succeeding further with their careers, businesses, and projects. It can also help them develop additional income.

Q: Why do you care about people succeeding?

A: Because lack of success often leads to misery for people. And because few things bother me more than seeing wasted potential.

Q: Why?

A: Because deep down I feel I have at times not reached my own potential. I’m working hard at improving that and would like to see other people do the same.

At this point we have gone deep enough. So when you boil it down, my “why” is helping other people’s lives by teaching them to leverage blogging so as to fulfill their own potential.

Now that I know my why at a blog level, I can define a plan of what needs to be done in order to carry out that purpose.

WHY your blog

The next part of the equation is ensuring that your why is conveyed to your users. Your blog should immediately answer the question, “Why should I subscribe to this blog?”.

Mine tells you upfront with its name, URL, and its tagline, “Grow your audience and make money online by sharing your knowledge”.

I can probably come up with a better tagline that is a little closer to my why. But the existing tagline and everything else on the site conveys the general idea of what I’m trying to do and thus visitors are able to quickly determine if they want to stick around or not.

They are either in or out. That mission either appeals to them or puts them off. What it doesn’t do is leave the reader wondering what the blog is about.

WHY this post

The final level of the why hierarchy is the “Why this post?”. Asking that question can really help you align your post content with your stated goal for the blog, and your own motivation for blogging.

For instance, this very post lines up with my stated purpose for the blog. In fact, I firmly believe that stopping for a moment to ask these important why questions, will lead you to much more purposeful blogging, in turn allowing you to succeed to a greater degree.

And that’s all I can hope for.