Why blog reading is so valuable

I fell behind on my RSS feeds in mid-July, and literally hadn’t followed them since. Until this week. After six weeks of not reading my favorite blogs (as the back-up got too intimidating to think about), this week I bit the bullet and dove back in.

I, of course, did plenty of aggressive skimming and saving of stuff to pay closer attention to later. But I also quickly noticed the sheer differences between NOT reading blogs for several weeks, and finally putting them back into my life.

The difference for me was noticeable. It included:

* More Innovation & Creative Thinking: I was quickly reminded that other smart bloggers give me fresh ideas and out-of-the-box thinking on a daily basis, including ideas that I can immediately and directly apply to my own daily work. Ideas spark other ideas, which have the power to ignite creativity in everyone around us. I wasn’t giving enough credit to the spark my daily blog reading was giving me, both personally and professionally.

* More Active Networking: In the past week, thanks to reading blogs again, I’m back to sending FYI articles and ideas to friends and colleagues. Sometimes it’s just to others within HouseValues, but it’s often to folks throughout my professional network that I think might benefit from the article or idea. I’m also commenting back on other bloggers’ work, which in turn is helping to expand my network even more. Important stuff.

* More Frequent Blogging: When I read more, I write more. When I’m inspired more, I have more to say. That constant flow of ideas, epiphanies and other inspiration fed my natural pipeline of posts for this blog. Without it, I was a far less-frequent contributor to this forum.

* More Newsletter Subscribers: With infrequent blog posts, my traffic went down, which also meant fewer new subscribers to my newsletter.