 In 2013, if you searched my name, one of the top results was instructions to play a Bon Jovi guitar riff that I posted in college and it was wrong. So I started blogging. And I found with blogging I've seen a lot of benefits. And today I want to talk about four of those that I've seen. I was a developer. I spent lots of time deepening the code, I'm programming, I'd be talking to a client and I'd say something like, how do I reply to a comment? Let me get back to you on that. This is a basic workflow thing, but the fact is I worked with programming. I didn't ever work in the WordPress workflow. So when I started my own blog, I did. I'm in that flow, I understand. Oh, well, this is how I do this on my site. Oh, this is what we needed to reply to a comment. So I've got this familiarity of the system, and that's a big help. The other thing that helps me understand things more is, as a developer, don't tell anyone, but there have been times I've copy and pasted code that worked and I didn't know why. Thank you Stack Overflow. So when I turn that into a blog post, though, I don't have that option, right? You don't want to see a blog post that says, hey, here's the code I used. It works somehow. I don't know why. You have to take a little more time and delve into it and understand what's going on. As mentioned, I used to be a teacher. And one of the things I found is it's amazing how much more you learn about something when you teach it. You really need to understand it. And a blog post gives me the chance to do that. Recall, I don't always remember things very well. And we have not yet got to the point where I can just plug in a hard drive and have that data. Though I'm looking forward to that, except for I hope Apple isn't the one to do it because they're always changing the connections, right? Oh, it goes in the ear. Oh, no. Nope, this new one goes in the nose. Oh, the new one goes in the spine. Spine. Spine. So I need to have this information somewhere where I can go and find it. That's great. I've got lots of options about where I can store information. I can use a notebook, right? But one of the things I'd like to be able to do, I'd like to be able to tag that information, maybe categorize the information, make it searchable. I get all that right out of the box with WordPress. That's default functionality. One of the things that helps me with remembering one of my useful blog posts, I have a plugin on the .org repository. It's called the Stop Emails plugin. All it does is stop outgoing emails, and I find it really helpful when I'm working on client sites. When you have a plugin on the .org repository, any time a new version of WordPress comes out, it's your job to test the plugin, make sure it still works, and then you increment that tested up to value to indicate that it works with that version of WordPress. And the process of doing that involves SVN. I don't know how to use SVN. So every time I had to do this, I'd go and figure it out all over again. And so I wrote a blog post now. And so whenever it's time to do that, I pull up the blog post, I follow a couple of steps, and I'm off to the races. I'm saving myself time there. We don't need to know all the answers, but it's really helpful if we know where to find them. Sharing. This is an amazing community we have. I love the WordPress community and the sharing that goes on, and the web community overall. It's terrific. I share them. It's wonderful. I also really enjoy meeting with people and discussing their problems and helping them work through them. Sometimes that's paid client work, but there are often opportunities to do that at other places, things like meetups. But the fact is spending time with people and helping them doesn't really scale. We only have a finite amount of time, and I found blog posts to be really helpful, because now I'll get an email from someone, hey, Sal, I've got this question, and I can say, oh, I wrote a blog post about that. Check it out. Let me know if you have questions. We'll run from there. And it gets us into that subject. So that's been terrific. In addition, I can share with people that I haven't even met, right? So Chrome clearing redirects. Real one, redirect, you go on a new page. Sometimes those get cached in Chrome, and it's really frustrating. And so I wrote a blog post about this couple of steps you need to do to clear those out. And I get a lot of traffic on this page, and hopefully everyone's finding it helpful. But these aren't people that I've ever met or anything. I'm not saying, oh, you need to clear these redirects. Go check out my blog post. So it's really nice being able to share with all these people. Sometimes, also, I share with myself, because I don't know the answer to a question. I search for it, and oh, it's my blog post that I find with the answer. Interestingly, many of the developers that I've spoken to who blog say they have that same experience. And it's kind of fun, because as a developer, you spend most of the time being very angry with your former self, right? You're always fighting. Oh, I can't believe Old Me did that. And it's nice every once in a while to say, Old Me, way to go. You got this one right. Brand building. I'm a developer, and when I hear brand building, it sounds like marketing to me, and sometimes it rubs me the wrong way. But we need to step back for a moment and think about what brand building really means. You want people to feel good when they think about you. As developers, we try and do that all the time by writing good code, right? Oh, yeah, they write good code. It does what I need. I like them. And so we want to build our brand. We want people to think positively of us. And some people might say, well, we're going to company. My brand is not important. But when you look around, we've got a lot of big agencies in the WordPress space. And I think a lot of the reputation has to do with the brand of their employees. We associate that with them. So building your brand is great for your employer. You're bringing value to them. That's always wonderful to bring value. Also, if it's ever time to find a new employer, it's great to have built your brand. That's going to help you when it's time to move on. So these are the four big benefits that I've seen from blogging. Now, lots of people agree with me, that's great, Sal, but there are hurdles here that we need to address. I just want to take a look at a couple of those. One of the big ones I hear is, I don't have time. And I look at blogging as an investment in myself. We talked about earlier how I have the plug-in, the instructions for updating the incremented up to value. And that saves me time. I moved my site to HTTPS a few months ago. When I did that, I made some notes and I created a blog post. I used some WPCLI commands and went through that. So it's really helpful now when I go for a client and I need to move them to HTTPS. I go back and refer to that article. I've got those notes. It gets me where I need to be. I'm saving time. You don't want to be the lumberjack trying to cut down the tree who's told, oh, you know what, that would go a lot faster if you sharpen your axe. I don't have time to sharpen my axe. I need to get this tree cut down. We want to be efficient. So it's an investment in myself. I don't have anything to write about. I certainly hear that one. As a developer, I would say if you have spent more than 20 minutes trying to figure something out, that would be a great blog post. So you could have saved yourself 20 minutes. And in the future, you could save yourself that. So you always have knowledge to share. And we're all at different levels. So wherever you were yesterday would have really appreciated that blog post. And there are lots of people who are where you were yesterday. Help them out. The final one in here is I will look dumb. Yes. And that's okay. Sometimes we look dumb. I'm particularly good at that. So I have often gotten corrections on things that maybe I had a mistake on or there was an improvement I could make or something just flat out wrong. And the good news is most of our community is filled with nice people. And they will tell you, hey, I think this could be a little better if we did this. I like what you're doing, but I'm not sure you have this area entirely right. It's great. Now, I'm not going to lie to you. You were going to occasionally get some rude comments. People really tear into you. And at that point, I delete their comment. This is my blog. You can say bad things about me, just not here. Finally, I just want to give you a couple of tips that I found have really helped me and things I try and keep in mind when I'm blogging. First one is keep a tight focus and make it short. We've got some great long-form bloggers in the WordPress ecosystem. That's not a great place to start. Start out with a problem and a solution. Exactly what you need when you're looking for something and you want to solve it. Immediately write a draft. There were times I'd say, oh, this is a good thing. I'll have to remember to write a draft tonight. Take that moment, go make a draft, and just put your notes in it. The bonus here is I will often find my solutions in a draft post that hasn't made it all the way to a blog post yet. It's that idea of expanding your memory, giving yourself that place that you have it all. So make a draft right away. Target the keywords you searched for. So if there was something you were searching for and you didn't find your answer, whatever you were searching for would probably make a good title for the article you're writing. SEO isn't about trying to trick anyone or anything. We want to make the relevant content easy to find. And you're saying, hey, this is what I was searching and this is exactly what I was looking for. It's a great way to guide people there. And finally my tip is choose a WordPress theme that doesn't require featured images. Featured images are great. They look nice. I use them a lot, but they can be a time sink. And you really don't want to have a blog post and say, oh, I really want to hit publish, but I need to figure out the picture I'm going to put on this and spend some time. So use one where it's optional. Give yourself that out. Thank you very much for your time. I'm Sal Feorello. I do work as Iron Code Studio. I have a blog post that goes along with this at salcode.com, and you can find me on Twitter as Salcode, S-A-L-C-O-D-E. Thank you very much.