Folks, in today's world of short attention span, there is so much content such as YouTube shorts, videos, etc taking advantage of this shift. How would you convince yourself to start writing a blog on a topic that has tons of content in video format already available out there?

For starters, people who read blogs come under specific audience and people who watch shorts come under specific audience. If you want to convince yourself for either writing a blog or creating shorts, look whom you want to target specifically and what is your purpose out of it? Making money or some kind of side hobby, etc. For example, Cal Newport a author who primarily discusses attention span and how to take advantage of it uses blogs and now long YouTube videos as his medium of distributing information.

That's a fair point @high-activity-31188. I primarily want to write a blog for improving my writing skills and along with that becoming an expert in the domain I'm planning to write in. And in the long run, also make some money from it 🙂

Hey Rajan! I had a similar discussion today with a friend about starting a hobby blog that has the same problem (cooking recipes). I am going to start writing, hoping that a step-by-step cooking recipe is preferred by folks over a video recipe which is sometimes full of fluff, small talks, etc. and is usually difficult to navigate if you miss a step.

In the content space, everything depends on your ability to pull, engage and continuously deliver high quality content. Build that process and work with your audience. ----------------------------------------- Videos/shorts vs text is a very strange way of looking at things. Each serves a different purpose. And there's a big overlap in the audience. Let us take the recipe example: I might watch a short that got recommended to get an idea of what the finished product will look like. This is almost always a sort of advertisement that leads me to a full video. (Think equivalent of tweeting about your blog) On full video, I understand the plan, see how each stage should look like. Get a feel for how to deal with things when they go wrong. All of this builds my mental map. These things are hard to capture in text. When I am ordering and actually making the food, I want text instructions because jumping around or checking quick details is easier there. I am going by my memory of how things flowed and looked in the video + specific instructions from the associated recipe. ----------------------------------------- Tech is very similar: I watch a video to understand the high level concept of something. On completely new tech, follow-along tutorials sometimes help me get familiarity with their bite sized incremental nature + conversation on "This is different from others because here you do X instead of Y" Closest text equivalent to above would be rustbook. But once I am somewhat familiar and want to get things done, I'll jump between reference/ X by example/ text tutorials. ----------------------------------------- Tldr; Use Shorts to draw new/existing audience in. Use Videos for concepts+nuances+flavour / iterative changes. Use Text for detailed/deeper steps. Bring your insight on any format and you'll stand out.

Those are some very good points and a perspective you brought up @dry-monkey-93718. I think sometimes our brain plays with us too much whenever there is a hard task at hand (writing :D)😄 I think that's what might have popped up this question for me. But I agree each format has its own audience and value gain depending upon the level of detail and understanding someone is looking for. Thanks @dry-monkey-93718 for clarifying and revising this idea in a beautiful way.

That's some healthy self reflection right there! 👏 Out of curiosity, what will be the your topic of your blog?

I'll be mostly writing on personal finance.

Content to is slack par hai personal finance and finance ka! 😅