Blogging on LinkedIn

In the past few years, blogging has taken the Internet by storm. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the web, covering a massive range of topics. Food, parenting, politics, news, humor, health and fitness, you name it, and there is probably a blog on it. If you want to become a blogger, you should first decide what you are going to write about, which can be challenging for many bloggers. But, the blogs with the most consistent themes are often the most successful. Once you have done that, your next step will likely be to choose where you will host your blog. As it turns out, that is no easy task either.
You can choose from dozens of popular websites: WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger are just a few of the most-used platforms. One place you may have never considered to host your blog, though, is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is considered primarily a professional social media platform, where people connect with colleagues, employers, and business contacts. Many think of LinkedIn as “Facebook for business people.” However, LinkedIn is now a growing community for bloggers.
Originally, LinkedIn was not suitably organized for blogs, considering that it did not accommodate the long-form posting style that bloggers prefer. The company took its first baby step with the “Influencers” program, which was comprised of roughly five hundred specially selected experts who did all the blogging. But, in 2014, LinkedIn finally launched the “Pulse” program, which opened up blogging to all 230 million English-speaking users, according to journalist Matt Kapko. Since then, the amount of people blogging on LinkedIn has skyrocketed. In about a year’s time, over one million long-form posts have been published, with authors adding(on average) 50,000 more articles every week.
While it may be hard for many bloggers to jump ship from the tried and true blog spots that they know, there are many advantages to blogging on LinkedIn, according to Kapko. Unlike other blog platforms, LinkedIn combines blogging with social media. As a user of LinkedIn, you already have connections from your personal and professional life, and so you do not have to do much promotional work for your blog. When using other, more popular blogging platforms, you have to put in a lot of work to stand out from the millions of other users and to amass a reader base. However, if you are already a LinkedIn user with a good deal of connections, you have a ready-made reader base.
Additionally, because LinkedIn is a serious and professional environment, the quality of blog posts, and more importantly, the comments and discussions, reflects that environment. Akshay Kothari, the cofounder of Pulse, explains that, “We don’t see a whole lot of spam or people just writing low-quality stuff on our platform, because anything you do on LinkedIn is tied to your professional identity.” On the flip side, this does limit your potential topic areas for your blog. As of right now, most blogs on LinkedIn focus on advertising, technology, marketing, finance, career development, and professional growth.
LinkedIn Pulse provides a great blog platform alternative for some people, but not for everyone. Those who want to blog about professional or career-based topics will find LinkedIn a viable option for their blogging. With the ready-made reader base, and the higher level of quality posts and discussions, LinkedIn has certainly created a good environment for blogging. But, with its limited topic range and concentration on professionalism, Pulse currently cannot completely replace other popular blogging platforms. For now, you can think of LinkedIn Pulse as “the professional self-publishing platform.”

Sources
http://www.cio.com/article/2899055/linkedin/why-you-should-use-linkedin-pulse-to-self-publish.html
http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/best-blogging-platforms-121413634