It was a few years ago, late in January of 2011 to be more precise. I remember feeling stressed out about something related to work, family, and many more things that were going on at the moment, you know that feeling right? It was early in the morning and I had just sat down after boarding the light train that I used to take from north Austin to downtown Austin every morning; yes Austin has a light train and it goes from north to south and it does have Wi-Fi on board. I opened my laptop and not knowing what to do, just started browsing the internet. At some point I found myself looking at my blog and decided to write a new post. The title is the first thing I wrote which was uncommon for me; I usually start by typing and don’t have a title until I have written a couple of paragraphs. Blog More. It is good for your health.
As miserable as I felt that morning, writing a new blog post made me feel relaxed and serene. It was like taking some sort of medicine which quickly killed my anxiety and stress that morning. The process of typing and constantly thinking about the next sentence kept my mind occupied and calm. I felt great. I guess the fact that I intentionally started writing about how good writing makes me feel contributed to make me feel better. Two years after that blog post I still feel the same way about the benefits of writing, perhaps even more convinced than before that blogging/writing really helps with your health. What’s interesting to me is that there are still many people today, who don’t want to have a blog because they say or think that they have nothing to write about. We all do, everyone has something to write about. You might think is not important or whatever, you shouldn’t care, just write and feel good about it. Writing is therapeutic. I often meet people who tell me that they don’t have time to have a blog, or to write in general. That is bull crap. The world would be a better place if everyone took the time to write something and spent less time complaining about feeling stressed and many other things.
Having a blog also helps a lot when you are trying to gain exposure and some attention for your startup or experiment as I like to call them. This is nothing new, and yet many startup founders find blogging useless and not worth their time so they neglect launching a blog along with their experiment, or startup. This is also bull crap. A few months ago, talking to my co-founders Johan and Stefan over coffee at a Starbucks around the Arboretum area in Austin, I mentioned that we needed to start a blog to help us reach out to potential members for our online community and our newsletter. The idea I told them, was to use the blog as a tool to make people aware of our little experiment and to hopefully increase awareness within our local Austin community and with anyone interested in the topics of entrepreneurship, tech and creatives. The blog idea didn’t seem that appealing or important to them but we went ahead and did it anyways. It works. A month after launching this blog, we’ve had about 236 followers between our blog and Facebook page and over 200 subscribers to our newsletter, all thanks to this new blog. My co-founders are happy with the blog, so much that one of them is also an active writer of this blog – check out his posts here.
When you are working in your startup idea, blogging is a great tool not only to achieve some awareness around your startup, it is also a great tool to organize your thoughts, and perhaps even tell your story as you go about building and growing your company. Do not come up with excuses not to write, if you can talk you can write.
Want to be part of our tribe of geeks and creatives? join us here.
The TechMap Blog 
Excellent points! I’ve always believed that the release of putting something down on paper, even if you end up not publishing it, is empowering. It’s therapeutic. Sometimes we might get discouraged when we see that we don’t get the views that other people are, but it’s important to remember that you are writing for yourself. Yes, we all have a story to tell. An audience will be there to listen. Thanks!
Reblogged this on Ricardo D. Sanchez.