I am about to reveal a shortcut to learning digital skills: Learn digital skills by blogging! Why? Let me walk you through what it means.
In an era where everyone, the government, and your employer are talking about upskilling, there’s a quiet truth that often people miss: you don’t need another course — you need a project.
We Gen Xers didn’t grow up with digital tools in our back pockets. But today, digital fluency is a must no matter what we do.
The good news? You just need to start a blog.
Not for likes. Not for followers. That is another topic all together. It is for experiential learning!
We all know that one of the fastest, most practical ways to learn digital skills by blogging is to be OJT or on-the-job training. What happens when there is no job to train? That is why we need experiential learning!
Let’s discuss.
Why a Blog is the Ultimate Way to Learn Digital Skills by Blogging
Let’s be clear and transparent: this isn’t about becoming a blogger or about starting a blog to get rich. It is about starting a blog and using it like a learning personal sandbox—a place where real learning happens through real doing. If eventually the blog becomes successful, then that is a bonus.
Here’s why blogging beats just reading tutorials online:
- ✅ You will learn multiple skill sets at once — branding, web tools, writing, visual design, and social media.
- ✅ Every skill is stackable and transferable to the modern workplace or freelance world.
- ✅ You’re building, publishing, tweaking — just like how tech professionals learn through shipping product.
- ✅ You’re expanding your scope of creativity – you may discover some brilliant ideas along the way!
This is what I call experiential digital learning — and it’s ideal for people who learn better by doing than by watching.
What You’ll Learn by Starting a Blog (Even If Nobody Reads It)
Let me break it down for you the key learnings from Learn digital skills by blogging here.
Starting a blog is like enrolling in a digital bootcamp. Every step teaches a new skill, and no step is wasted.
| Learning Curriculum | What You Learn |
| 1. Pick a domain name | When choosing a name for your blog, you need to learn what type of name suits your niche, what are the registrars to use, what domain extensions you should register or do you need to invest domain name from domain marketplace? |
| 2. Set up hosting | Next is to decide who to host your website, the location of your host server. (Example: if you sign up for affordable US host, but the server is in US and your audience is in Asia, this may affect your web speed. |
| 3. WordPress | I recommend WordPress (WP). 40% of business out there are powered by WP. It’s easy to learn, easy to setup. Most host support WordPress installation. Hence, you will learn how to setup WordPress site and start to learn WordPress web design tool and plugins. |
| 3. Research blog topic/direction | When researching what to blog and your audience, you will learn to research blog direction, learn about what type of blog attracts and their competition. Usually, niche blog tends to do well if they are targeted well. |
| 4. Plan your social strategy | To promote blog, you will need to plan your social media strategy. You will research and learn what social media strategy works best for your blog. Important is to develop plan to sustain consistently, tone setting, content calendar. Lot of learning here! |
| 5. Create content | To create content, you will learn how to develop compelling content that will aligns the google search engine and also AI chatbot answering engine. And also how to leverage AI to plan your blog ideas and blog outline. |
| 6. Image Design | With blog and social media, you will need graphic designs. Here you will learn how Canva can assist in creating compelling images for blog and also for social media posting. |
| 6. SEO research | All blog needs SEO optimization. (This article is not about SEO). Here, you can learn how to create SEO for technical optimization, generating keyword, SEO title, meta description and using plugins in WordPress like mathrank or yoast to optimize your article technically. |
| 7. Next step learning | After you have done step 1 to step 6, the next step you can consider looking at site speed, google console, google analytics, SEO keyword research tools to drive better SEO performance. Lot of learnings here! |
💡 Pro Tip: The tell-tale sign of what you have achieved digitally is when you start to look for ways to do the tasks more productively every week.
Why Gen X Learners Will Thrive with Blogging
If you are feeling plateaued or stagnant by now, why not learn digital skills by blogging? It may be the big break you need to discover a new direction. Along the way, you will also pick up new digital skills and build up your digital confidence. I feel this is a win-win initiative.
For us Gen X, learning needs to be relevant, structured, and purposeful. Blogging checks all three.
Here’s why it works so well:
- ✅ You’re solving real problems by learning — not theory.
- ✅ You control the pace of learning — fast or slow, public or private.
- ✅ You gain digital and creative confidence as you do, not just plan.
This is not a YouTube rabbit hole. It’s a tangible space to build momentum, apply your skills, and document your learning. You never know. It may just evolve into something else. Many opportunities often derive from immersive experience.
In short, learning to blog helps prepare us to stay relevant, upskill our skillsets, and potentially discover new opportunities.
“But I Don’t Want to Be a Blogger…” (Perfect — You Don’t Have To Be)
This is one of the biggest misconceptions. You don’t have to if you have no passion for being a blogger. The idea behind is to let yourself walk from step 1 to step 6. This is an OJT, project-based learning. Along this journey, you would have mastered understanding digital technologies.
You’re not blogging to build an audience — you’re blogging to build your skill set. And if your blog is successful, where you gain an audience, followers, and expand your network, then that is a bonus!
What Blogging helps you:
- Understand how digital platforms work
- Communicate clearly in the digital age
- Explore side hustles or career shifts without pressure
- Teach others (or your future self) what you’ve learned
Whether you’re mentoring, freelancing, or job hunting, a blog becomes a living portfolio of your growth.
How to Learn Digital Skills by Blogging: Step-by-Step (Quick Start)
Ready to try? Here’s your launch checklist.
Tools You’ll Need:
- Domain name (Namecheap, Spaceship or GoDaddy)
- Hosting (Hostinger, SiteGround, Bluehost)
- CMS (WordPress)
- Visuals (Canva)
- Content calendar (Google Sheets or Notion or Excel)
How to create it fast:
- Pick a blog name and secure the domain
- Set up a WordPress blog with a free theme
- Write your first post (keep it short and honest)
- Add a simple image from Canva
- Setup a facebook page
- Research and plan your social media post
- Prepare a social media calendar on excel
- Schedule your blog post and social media postings. That’s it.
Even with one post, you’ll already have learned:
- How to register domain, and set up DNS for your website
- Install your WordPress
- Setup WordPress website by selecting a free theme
- Learn to setup proper web page
- Learn the use of WordPress plugins
- Research niche for blog
- Research blog ideas for the niche
- Research blog outline
- Create Featured image of blog on Canva
- Published or schedule blog post
- Setup Facebook page
- Create social media calendar
- Design social media post on Canva
- Schedule the post on Meta scheduler
As you can see, there is a lot to learn. Even if your blog is just five posts for a year—it does not matter—you will have learned to do it by learning the different platforms and tools to create it. That is experiential learning!
Final Thoughts: Learn Digital Skills by Blogging
What I just shared is about upskilling and learning new digital skills. Do not get me wrong; attending courses helps. What I am trying to highlight is that you need experiential learning. The best way is to start a project. Learn digital skills by blogging.
Otherwise, after spending your skills future credits or attending a course, if you do not practice in a real case, you will tend to forget the skill sets.
Besides, there is also something interesting. I commonly get asked questions like, for instance, “Do I need to set up a website if I can just open a blogging account from some blogging platform? “
Yes, you can do that. I advocated learning WordPress because it is not so much about just setting up a blog. It is about learning the WordPress environment and platform so that you could subsequently explore using WordPress as a complex website like many businesses do.
Hence, learn digital skills by blogging is about clocking up your digital experiences. It may have a broader scope in the future, depending on the situation you are in.
Finally, I want to say, don’t worry if only your cat reads your blog. Once you walk through steps 1 to 6, you will have mastered some level of understanding.
And maybe one day, you’ll teach someone else — not through a tutorial, but through your own lived experience.
🔗Resources
Best resources for a Beginner 👇
