Let’s just be real: Bloggers want to be read so bloggers must be readers. The truth though, is that making a blog can be so consuming in time, resources, and energy that would-be reading hours are now often gobbled up by posting, polishing, and promoting. But what if all you want is to be a better blogger, no matter what it takes?!
Who has time to read when there are newsletters to be written, emails to answer, and readers waiting for that next amazing tutorial?!
The good news is reading can be manageable, free, and done first thing when you wake up or the last thing right before bed. In fact, reading might be just the thing to take that nonstop blogging to-do list out of your head!
But for the blogger who is striving for greatness, the better news is that reading can catapult your blog to success! How so? Let’s take a look!
[bctt tweet=”Reading can catapult your blog to success! #bloggerlife” username=”perfectplaying”]
8 Surprising Ways Reading Makes You a Better Blogger
First, let’s consider the science of reading. Did you know that making a habit of reading can be related to longer life!? Yep, according to some studies, if you read just 30 minutes a day you can be adding a couple of years to your life!
Here are some other amazing benefits to reading:
- Reading helps your brain be healthy (new pathways are formed as you think critically)
- Reading can help you think quicker
- Reading to kids helps their literacy skills skyrocket
- Reading helps your brain stay adaptive
- Reading can delay cognitive decline
- Reading can increase your emotional intelligence (especially empathy)
Now all of these benefits can be had from reading books (fiction or non-fiction), magazines, or even blogs, but what about a blogger specifically getting a blogging benefit from reading?
Let’s check out some surprising ways reading makes a blogger a better blogger!
1. A Better Blogger: Creativity from Reading
One of the early fears of blogging is the fear of running out of ideas. A new blogger or would-be blogger worries that they will not have enough recipes (if they are a food blogger), or only have so many printables to offer (as a DIY blogger), or are scared that they won’t be able to create posts about making money forever (for financial bloggers).
Good news! There are no caps, end points, or finish lines with creativity!
[bctt tweet=”Good news! There are no caps, end points, or finish lines with creativity! #bloggerlife #create” username=”perfectplaying”]
There’s a good chance that with the more reading you do, you will have more ideas than you ever have time for! And if you do find yourself drying up creatively, that’s probably a sign you have been working too hard and need a break, and maybe a perfect break is a new book. What better way to take a break than by reading a book?!
Reading can fuel you, and hence your blog, with all sorts of new perspectives. You can pick up a book, and before you know it, you will be shocked with inspiration for new ways of writing, infused with innovative takes on common topics, and full of fresh marketing techniques and maybe even granted a renewed love for blogging.
If you find yourself needing a dose of creativity for your blogging, and let’s be honest, all bloggers can benefit from creative injections every now and then, pick up a book and get blogging!
Reading for Creativity:
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: Creativity can strike at any moment so try your hardest to create an easy-to-keep-to way of capturing all your creative ideas, so they don’t get lost or forgotten!
2. A Better Blogger: Income from Reading
Let’s be real, blogging these days usually accompanies a little wish inside the blogger’s heart, and that wish has a dollar sign on it. Many bloggers hope to earn some money from their long hours of content creation, social media curation, and product production.
To make money though, there are endless avenues to explore, rules to understand, and heck there are even taxes to figure out. Dealing with percentages, basic algebra, and quarterly projections can be totally overwhelming for people who usually prefer English or art class over math-related-anything.
While devoting a good part of blogging time to actually blogging is quite wise, if a blogger makes a dime or hopes to make more than a dime, that blogger can greatly benefit from reading up on all things financial.
Sure, budgeting for home management is a skill lauded by many financial bloggers, but I bet even the savviest of savers could use some nightly reading in the tax department or perhaps on how to effectively leave a legacy for their non-blogging kin.
You might have an endless onslaught of ideas always filling your head and notebooks, but there’s a good chance a blogger will never run out of lessons they could be learning on how to monetize their blog more effectively, how to manage their resources better, and how to make the most of the income opportunities for bloggers.
If you’re a blogger looking to up your monetary game, consider making a weekly reading habit of learning more about income potential as a blogger. Come this time next year; you just might think reading is the best thing you’ve done for yourself, your income, and your blog.
Reading for Income:
Money-Making Mom: How Every Woman Can Earn More and Make a Difference
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: Earning money while blogging can be tricky! One of the best ways to get going with it is through affiliate marketing, and although you might be scared to try, you may discover it to be quite profitable!
3. A Better Blogger: Skills from Reading
Blogging is advancing to all sorts of levels. Bloggers are no longer just recorders of daily meals, parenting issues, and favorite traveling memories. Blogging is growing and evolving all the time and to keep up, or more importantly to be ever growing, just like anything in life, a blogger must improve.
Thankfully, it is easier than ever to increase blogging skills no matter how long you have been blogging or what kind of blogger you are.
- If you are a blogging veteran, you might benefit from reading about a completely new skill you haven’t ever tried but always had an interest in.
- If you are a new blogger, you may want to pick a few vital skills such as WordPress training, design fundamentals, and photography basics.
No matter how your blog is going, where you are triumphing or struggling, reading up on how to improve your weak spots just might prove to be the exact thing to get you unstuck out of a rut, get you moving forward, and make you feel like your blog is really representing all facets of your personality.
Book suggestion:
DSLR Photography for Beginners: Take 10 Times Better Pictures in 48 Hours or Less! Best Way to Learn Digital Photography, Master Your DSLR Camera & Improve Your Digital SLR Photography Skills
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: One of the skills every new or old blogger can work on is mastering their pages! That’s right, posts usually get all the attention but a blog’s pages can make drastic differences in every aspect of blogging! Here’s a list of over 50 blog page ideas with over 150 examples!
4. A Better Blogger: Productivity from Reading
You know how starts can be great, but endings can be so hard to get to? Like the famed New Year’s resolution gone bad, the diet that stops, or the online course that will be great if ever finished?
In complete transparency, the biggest obstacle to blogging might be productivity. Competing against a blogger’s next post are the open tabs of social media clamoring for the blogger’s attention, the real-life demands such as lunches to be made and laundry put away, and of course, the clock that never seems to spin in our direction.
If you ever find yourself full of blogging ideas, pretty solid on information and skills, but just can never find the time to actually work on your blog, do yourself a gigantic favor and help yourself to some blogging productivity hacks that are only a few nights of reading away.
You don’t want to look back on your blogging goals and think, “If only I had the time it could have worked out!” We all, us ordinary folks all the way to Oprah and Pat Flynn, we all have the same 24 hours in a day, it’s just how we choose to use those precious hours.
Make time, even just five minutes a day, to read up on ways to increase your productivity, and your blog might become more than you ever dreamed.
Book suggestion:
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: One of the keys to being productive is being okay with messing up! Seriously. If you come to be okay with the possibility of failure, just like every athlete sometimes loses a game, you may reach monumental success!
5. A Better Blogger: Rest from Reading
Oh, dear blogger, if you and I were sitting together and were eye-to-eye sharing our blogging truths, would your eyes be weary and heavy with lack of rest?
Many bloggers are spending their days trying to squeeze in more hours, more minutes even, of just a little more blogging time because they have so many other tasks taking their energy during their days.
Many bloggers work full-time while blogging, many bloggers are meeting needs of little people every minute those little people aren’t sleeping, and so many bloggers are shocked at how long any blogging task can take from writing a post to finding the perfect image (you think you can for sure have a new post ready before you go to bed only to discover that four hours later the post isn’t done and you’re still not in bed)!
Can anything ever be done truly well without rest, though? Is it possible to go, go, go, and everything turn out swell?
Sooner or later the caffeine wears out, the body breaks down, and the words on the page start to blur. The good news is: You don’t have to kill yourself over your blog. You don’t.
You can rest. You can have a day off. You can walk away from your blog and your life on social media, and your blog will be just fine.
Be a better blogger by being a more rested blogger. In case you are stuck in busy and need a little bit of a reminder to take a breath, rest, and refresh, reading a book will likely be the perfect tool to usher you into peaceful blogging existence.
Book suggestion:
Only Love Today: Reminders to Breathe More, Stress Less, and Choose Love
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: Sometimes it’s not your body that needs a rest… but your blogging. If you’ve been trying to push out a post for hours, you may want to take a break from blogging at all, or just move on over to another blogging task such as editing pictures or responding to comments.
6. A Better Blogger: Tranquility from Reading
Tranquility is different than rest. Tranquility is often the result of rest, it’s that calmness, that peacefulness, that comes after a nap, after a day spent by the fire with loved ones, after a much-needed weekend of doing nothing.
It can be super hard to enter into a state of tranquility as a blogger. Sure, maybe you are doing a fantastic job at time management and doing all your blogging to-dos while getting a full night’s rest daily. However, do you have a calmness when you hit publish on every post? Do you feel peaceful about how your blog is doing, and you’re able not to be worried about what other bloggers are doing?
Do you have a quiet inside your mind when it comes to your blog? A confident quiet, that you don’t have a million things going on in your head all the time about how you have to do this or should do that, but you have an inner quiet in your mind when it comes to your blog that all is okay, you’re okay as a blogger, and the results aren’t really in your hands anyway?
One of the best ways to enter into a tranquil state as a blogger is to read, especially fiction reading. It has been found that those who read fiction especially have higher emotional intelligence and are more likely to be empathetic than those who read the news. If you think about it, this makes sense. Instead of being lost in your world, you can get lost in another’s world and realize that often what we worry about doesn’t matter much.
Sometimes being a better blogger has more to do with your non-blogging hours than your blogging hours. If you find yourself yearning for a more peaceful blogging life, take a chance on a book, it might just transport you to just where you need to be.
[bctt tweet=”Sometimes blogging has more to do with your non-blogging hours than your blogging hours. #blog” username=”perfectplaying”]
Book suggestion:
The Sea of Tranquility: A Novel
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: One of the best ways to feel more tranquil amidst all of blogging’s ups and downs is with guarding your health! Here are 30 of the best healthy quotes to remind you about setting yourself up for peace of mind, body, and soul as well as peace of blogging.
7. A Better Blogger: Writing from Reading
Reading makes you a better writer, and all bloggers need to write well.
If your blog doesn’t quite read like how you want it to, if you feel like you haven’t found your blogging voice, or you are now venturing into book writing and have to change your writing for publication, consider reading up on writing, or just reading to write well.
If you have a writer you admire, challenge yourself to find out how much they read, and then mimic that behavior. Sure, you can’t and shouldn’t want to write exactly like your beloved favorite writer, but you can learn to prepare to write as they do and that very likely includes reading.
In fact, many writers are known for reading way more than they write. Often, if a writer is faced with time crunches reading doesn’t get cut entirely; both the reading and writing stay in place but may decrease in amounts of time. Some of the reading writers do though, is very much aimed at targeting writing and so a writer’s library is often full of writing books.
Just like you learned how to write certain types of essays in school, for your blogging work you likely can benefit from learning how to write certain types of creative ways. If you’re serious about the writing aspect of blogging, studying a book on writing could totally transform your blog.
Being a better blogger might come down to being a better writer, which could happen by being a better reader.
Book suggestion:
Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: One of the best tips for being a better blogger, and a better writer, is to simply write. The hard part is that writing every day can be a challenge. No matter what happens, if you’re super busy, if someone is sick, if your schedule is about to burst, write something, anything, but write.
8. A Better Blogger: Longevity from Reading
Have you seen how many bloggers quit blogging? Ever come across an abandoned blog? By chance, has a blog you used to follow not been updated in months, or years and basically, it seems safe to say the blogger has left blogging?
If there is one thing a blogger needs to do, it’s to keep going. Sure, blogging can be confusing, and exhausting, and at times depressing. Suffering doesn’t mean you have to quit though; suffering is part of the journey. Heck, suffering might give you something to blog about.
If you are a blogger in your heart of hearts, don’t let anything stop you, but try your best to put preventative measures in place when the “I wanna quit” thoughts come racing in. One of the best ways to stay blogging is to stay healthy, and health is improved with staying informed. Sure eat right, exercise, but also read about being healthy, so you aren’t surviving on misguided information passed down.
Reading can let you know how to keep going as a blogger, but also as a person who happens to be blogging. Your blog is fueled by how you are fueling yourself as a person so be sure to invest in your own longterm status as much as you can.
The next time you’re feeling burned out, frustrated, and wondering if you can go on with your blog, pick up a book that will challenge your status quo and you will quite likely get the jump-start you need to get back into blogging as a better, healthier you. Be a better blogger by reading about how to be a better you.
Book suggestion:
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
Better Blogger Blogging Tip: Starting a blog is pretty common, but staying with a blog is no easy task. If you are really on the verge of breaking up with blogging, before you do, take a break. Maybe take a day, a week, a month, or even a year before you full on commit to hanging up your days on that WordPress dashboard forever.
[bctt tweet=”If there is one thing a blogger needs to do, it’s to keep going. #blogbetter” username=”perfectplaying”]
Being a blogger is not exactly easy stuff. But what worthwhile adventure is all pie and cake and Netflix on the couch?
If you want to be a better blogger, you can be! That’s the awesome news of the hour!
Next up awesome news – being a better blogger is often getting some information you’ve been missing out on, being privy to some tested strategies that carry over in most any entrepreneurial venture, and filling in gaps of skill-sets you haven’t become your best in yet. Lucky you, all of this and more can be found in a book!
Yep, being a better blogger may just be one reading of a book away! Read all you can to blog all you can.
Excited about being a better blogger by reading more? *Pin* this post for times when your books get neglected, and you need reminders on how to be a better blogger by reading! If you’re a bookish blogger looking for more bookable pins, follow Playing Perfect’s Pinterest Page!
Ready to add to your reading list? Here are 16 must-read blogging books!
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