Owning and maintaining a blog is no easy feat. If you’ve got your very own, successful blog go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back, because seriously, you deserve it.

Blogging can be a daunting experience and you will find that you learn a variety of different skills and abilities very quickly. You have to, otherwise you get left behind.

How to market yourself, how to write more efficiently, possibly how to write HTML or CSS – all things you might never have considered before you started.

So what benefits could starting another blog about your personal development actually bring? Surprisingly, more than you might think.

What to Write in Your Personal Development Blog

Having another blog to write in might sound daunting, especially if you struggle to write consistently for your original blog, but that is what makes a personal development blog great. It’s personal. It doesn’t matter if you post every hour or every week, it doesn’t matter if each post is 100 words or 1,000, the point is – you write what you want.

Use a personal development blog to write about things you have accomplished, challenges you intend to complete – just write about your day if you want! It doesn’t even have to be about your development, perhaps a poem, a story or any other piece of creative, instructive writing you want!

You are free to write what you like and this is important, writing what you want improves your writing skills and as you will see below, it also has a number of added benefits.

Just because this is a personal development blog, doesn’t mean it has to be private. Although bear in mind, that if you do make it public – people will of course be able to see what you write. If you do choose to make your personal development blog public – remember that it is in essence a blogging exercise and so, you shouldn’t fret about visitor numbers.

The Benefits of a Personal Development Blog

Learn How to Use a New Blogging Platform

If you created your original blog with WordPress, go ahead and create your personal development blog with Blogger or Tumblr. Likewise, if you’ve used any other platform, be sure to check out something different. Take a look at four of the major free blogging options you have available to you:

Now why should you use something different when you’re perfectly happy with what you’re using at the moment?

If you don’t try other platforms, you’ll never know if they are more suited to you. Perhaps you’re using WordPress, but after trying Blogger, you realise that its easy-to-use feature set is more your style. Or perhaps after trying Tumblr, you realise that heavily photo-orientated, short update style of blogging is more your thing.

Practice Your Writing

Now, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the age old saying of ‘Practice makes perfect’ and it is very true! When you’re writing for your original blog, there can often be a lot of pressure on you to write well – and of course, you should be trying to write well! But this can often lead to you spending less time writing and more time researching and editing.

By having a second, personal development blog you aren’t restricted by the need to research before you write – you only need to concentrate on your writing.

Try New Styles of Writing

When you build a blog, you also spend a lot of time developing the community that goes with it. From Twitter followers to RSS subscribers, you can end up with a lot of people watching your blog.

These people chose to follow your blog for a reason – your content.

Ideally you should be posting content relating to a refined niche, which can be quite restrictive when you have other types of content you want to share.

By having a separate, personal development blog, you are free to post what you want – about whatever you want. It gives you free reign to try writing about new things or even try new styles of writing, such as recipes, poems, short stories, etc.

Overcome Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is something all of us will have experienced at one point or another. Do you remember how you got around it?

Often we can get caught up in trying to write a certain article, which leaves us stalling at the keyboard.

Speaking from experience, writing is the best way to get through writer’s block – a catch 22 situation? Not quite.

If you’ve set up your personal development blog, start writing for it. Because it can be about anything you want it is much easier to write for it. Keep writing whatever comes to mind and get those creative juices flowing again.

Promote Yourself and Network

Although your personal development blog should primarily be a personal blog to fill with your thoughts, you may find that it develops somewhat of an audience. If this is the case, don’t be afraid to use this opportunity to generate some hype for your original blog. Also, if you’re getting comments – be sure to network. You never know who you’re talking to or what benefits they could offer to you.

Chart Your Progress

Use your personal development blog to write whatever thoughts you feel you need to jot down. But also use it to chart how you are developing as a blogger and writer.

Write down techniques that you have tried, what worked and what didn’t. Write down about the day you got the best response from a social media site, the first time you wrote over 1,000 words or even the first time you got a complimentary comment.

You can then always head back through your personal development blog’s archives to see for yourself how you have improved with time – and perhaps stumble across some older ideas that you could apply to your original blog again.

Become Accustomed to Writing More Frequently

One of the great things about having a personal development blog is that you can write there freely. As such you will find yourself writing there much more often – for example, in the time it has taken me to write this post, I have written three over on my personal development blog.

By continuing to write on your development blog, you become accustomed to writing and as such, writing becomes more natural. As it is easier to write, you’ll find it easier to produce regular content for your main blog.

Reignite Your Passion for Writing

When you write about one topic over and over, you can become bored of it. Even if it is you hobby or passion, you can still become a little tired of writing about the same things.

Fortunately this isn’t a permanent state of mind and more often than not, you simply need to jot down your feelings about something else – simply express your thoughts and feelings on something other than the usual.

Your personal development blog is the space to express these feelings and thoughts that you feel your main blog’s readers won’t appreciate.

Writing passionately about another subject will rapidly bring back your passion for writing as a whole and you’ll soon find yourself back on your main blog wondering how you ever got bored of it in the first place!

Go Forth and Develop!

So, hopefully I’ve given you a few good reasons why you should be blogging on both your ‘main’ or ‘original’ blog alongside a ‘personal development’ blog. Don’t forget that your personal development blog is a space for you to write anything and everything – something that your main blog might not be.

Go ahead now and create a new development blog – it only takes a minute with the likes of Google’s Blogger. Now, write your first post and simply state that you plan to use this space to write anything and everything. Then, be sure to head back when you need to do just that!

Feel free to leave a link to your Personal Development blog in the comments below if you feel like sharing!

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