4 reasons learning to blog helps CFA charterholders

CFA candidates and charterholders have great quantitative and analytical skills, so why should they care about learning to blog? The ability to write a great blog post matters because good writing skills will carry you far in your career—and life in general. There are four reasons that learning to blog helps CFA charterholders at all stages of their careers.

Reason 1: Writing is an essential career skill

The world’s best ideas don’t mean anything if you can’t move people to act on them. Whether you’re writing an equity research report, a marketing email, a resume, or a blog post, good writing will boost the impact of your ideas.

Reason 2: Blogging is a great way to improve your writing

 Blog posts are short, which makes it easier to produce many of them. Yet each post must satisfy the basic requirements of strong written communications:

1. A strong title and introduction, which quickly relays your main message.
2. Information about why your readers should care about your topic—your audience suffers from information overload. Readers want to know “What’s in it for me?” before they invest time in your piece.
3. Reader-friendly writing—this means writing that’s well organized and economically written. A logical flow of information, informative headings, and strong topic sentences make it easy for people to understand your message even when they only skim it. Short sentences that avoid jargon make it easy for readers to absorb your details.

These characteristics will serve you well in most written communications. Financial professionals who have taken my blogging class tell me that they’ve applied my lessons to emails, articles, and more.

Reason 3: You may need to blog for work

The number of investment management firms in the blogosphere has been increasing. The range of corporate blog contributors is also expanding, from the strategists who’ve traditionally opined on markets, to folks in lower-level roles and with other areas of expertise.

Blogging is also relevant to CFA charterholders who go out on their own, whether they start private wealth management firms, launch a product, or do consulting. A blog is a great way for smaller firms to differentiate themselves with a display of personality. That’s much harder for a large firm limited by a bureaucracy, corporate branding guidelines, or other constraints.

All of this makes it increasingly likely that you’ll need to blog at some point in your career.

Reason 4: It’s fun and helps you think better

Blogging can be fun. Writing helps you to develop your ideas. It’s satisfying when a glimmer of an idea turns into a complete post. Even better is when your posts help—and spur comments from—your readers.

Start now!

You can start blogging today. It’s easy to set up your own blog using free software from WordPress.com or other providers. You can also contact other people with blogs for guest-posting opportunities. I’ve blogged about how to find opportunities in “How to guest-blog on personal finance or investments—Part I Your approach” and “Part II Blogs that accept guest posts from financial advisors.”

Check out my five-week financial blogging class if you’d like to learn more about writing blog posts.

Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.