Blogs are very alive today and surf on the high crest of waves thanks to their innate nature: they live on websites. Who owns the website? If you have purchased the domain name, a sort of postcode for your website, ownership of all the content on your website is yours. Nobody can touch it without your approval.

One may think social media is better than blogs for sharing content. They are more smartphone-friendly, for sure, than dealing with a whole website. Social media are very good for entertainment purposes and, consequently, for advertising. They have two big downsides that unfortunately cannot be as reliable as blogs to share content:

• Nobody is going to conduct research on social media. People still google things in the browser. They may use different search engines other than google, like Bing or Yahoo, but they are still accessed through the internet, which is supposed to be free, and not through social media platforms.
• You do not have ownership over your social media account. You may think that logging in with a password is enough to open an account. You cannot actually control the source code of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, for example. If one day they decide to remove your account for any reason, there is not much you can do about it.
  You can instead control the source code of the website that hosts your blog, particularly if you are using WordPress as a CMS to build the website itself.
• Blogs can be started from scratch without the need for social media accounts. You do not need to be active on social media before you start blogging. The blog is a powerful tool to affirm one’s authority in a certain field. It allows one to go deep into subjects and propose one’s ideas and point of view in a structured way. The time line is the main leader when posting articles: what’s said today may be reviewed tomorrow, but if concepts are deep, they may last for decades, retaining their authorship and consequently being able to monetize ideas.

Because social media mesmerises and entertains, do not get befooled by nice colours and sounds by thinking you can develop a business uniquely on one or two social media platforms. It may be a starting point, but eventually you need a website that will host, connect all these platforms together, and give you a professional touch on the internet.