Three Reasons to Write a Blog
As I start blogging, I would like to clarify my reasons to write a blog. It is for my lazy future self who will have forgot blogging. I hope he will get motivated again by reading this.
Outputting constantly to consolidate my daily inputs
My 2018’s resolution is to learn a lot and make a lot. But because human memory is unreliable, I easily forget what I have learned through reading and watching stuff. To prevent that, I would like to document my daily learning.
Also, when we try to explaining something with our words, we often realise that we have not understood the subject. We tend to think we have understood it, but most of the times we have not yet. The process of inputting one’s leaning and outputting it again seems troublesome, but it is rather effective for understanding and consolidating one’s memory.
Publishing thoughts to build a network
By publishing my interests and thoughts, I hope to get to know interesting people.
The supervisor of my PhD is a sonic artist. He documents his activities on his LinkedIn blog. Once he told me that most of his new projects and works begin with a message coming from someone who read his blog. He occasionally said to me, ‘Masa, you should write a blog, too’.
One of the income sources
What reminded me of Medium was an email from Amazon Associates Program.
Amazon Associates is an affiliate marketing program that allows website owners and bloggers to create links and earn referral fees when customers click through and buy products from Amazon.com. It’s completely free to join and easy to use. (Amazon)
I registered to the programme several years ago, but since I do not run websites or blogs with affiliate ads, the emails I receive from them are usually say something like, ‘You have not reached the minimum amount for payment this month’.
However, the email I received on 1 December 2017 sounded different. It says, ‘As you have earned ¥1,568 and the accumulated amount of earnings is ¥5,079, this will be this month’s payment’. I used to have a blog when I was an undergraduate, but it was more or less a diary, and earnings never reached ¥1,000.
I found out that the earnings all come from one post. It was my only Medium article then, which I wrote as a break from doctoral thesis writing without hoping financial return. Here is the English version of the post.
I guess the earning flow would be like this:
Producers who want to make sounds influenced by Ryuichi Sakamoto google his production environment > They land on the post above > They find that Sakamoto uses SHURE MV88 in his production > ‘Maybe I can use this little microphone for my production, too. Hmm, let’s get one’.
In December, the post sold ten of SHURE MV88s and that one article earned nearly ¥5,000 in one month.
What I learnt from this event is that although Medium is said to be not suitable for affiliates, if you write a post which has value to someone, you can earn some through Amazon Associates Program. With the increasing speed of changes in the current society, it is safer to have multiple income sources. I will report how I go with Amazon Associates Program and Medium again, from time to time.
Summary
My three reasons to write a blog are:
- Outputting constantly to consolidate my daily inputs
- Publishing thoughts to build a network
- One of the income sources
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