5 no-monetary things you can get with a blog
RobertoAlamos.com talks about how to make money online with any kind of website. This is a hot topic these days, particularly how to make money with blogs through all the alternatives you have at your disposition: affiliate marketing, text link ads, paid reviews and of course Google Adsense.
But there’s more to blogs than just money making. In fact, the idea of making money from blogs is discussed almost exclusively between web-savvy people that know about advertising alternatives and how to extract the last cent from their traffic. But as you may know, there isn’t a lot of web-savvy people in the world, in fact the vast majority of the people can hardly create a blog on free services like Blogger, so they will have even a harder time trying to monetize their blogs.Fortunately, blogs are not only money making machines. So if you are one of those not-web-savvy people, and you are trying to figure it out what’s about those “blogs” and what you can expect from them given your limited ability with Word or Excel, here’s a list of things you can get from your blog, and that do not include extracting a dime out of them.
Build a reputation
People write about a lot of topics on their blogs. In fact, if you think about any topic I’m sure you can find a blog that covers that topic with some level of deepness. So, it doesn’t matter if you are a physician, a teacher, a fireman, a clow or a president: You do something of value and you can share your knowledge about that. By writing about a topic you know you will at least build a reputation of some level of expertise on your field, so although you won’t be making money with your blog, you still have hopes to get out something out of it.
Build relationships
Surely you know some people that makes something similar to your occupation, and surely a lot of that people is from your same local area. Guess what? With a blog devoted to your field of occupation, it’s inevitable to make connections with people that do the same as you… from the whole world. That’s right, even if you don’t look for them they will find you. Maybe a colleague from Liechtenstein or a student from México, they will contact you regarding some issue about your topic of knowledge. Those relationships will be beneficial for you under all the points of view so be sure to take care of all of them, they can open unexpected doors for you!
Learn by teaching
Have you ever noticed that the best way to learn something new is to teach it? Maybe you just need a personal diary or a public outlet to write your thoughts about certain topic you are researching, either way a blog is the perfect option to do that, and you will even be able to enjoy the benefits from the first two points showed in this article. So don’t hesitate and start writing about that new hobby now.
Sell services
Maybe you don’t know how to monetize your blog, but if you have some service to offer that’s not a good reason to keep you from offering it in your blog. The potential rewards of offering are huge: you can sell service to the whole world maybe asking for prices greater than the ones you can ask in your local area. Unfortunately your success selling your services is in direct relation with your success in creating a reputation and a community of readers around your blog, so don’t expect to be able to do this very soon unless you offer a very unique service.
Leave your mark in the world
Finally, maybe you don’t want to build a reputation or make relationships or learn something new or sell some kind of service. Maybe you just want to leave a mark in the world, a testimony that you were here. Well, at this point I’m sure you know that a blog is the perfect way to do that because in the Internet there’s no eraser. If you left something online for sufficient time, that piece of information will be stored in some search engine for a long long time, maybe for ever. So don’t be shy and say hello to your grandsons, yeah, grandpa was an early adopter in his young years!
Now you know what to do with a blog, so why don’t start practicing by subscribing to RobertoAlamos.com by email or RSS? That’s a way of relationship building 
April 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
True about blogs , building relationships and reputaion, teaching people. But i guess blogs is about sharing something you have or are interested in , to the world. Once people are comfortable with their blogging skills , most will definately like to monetise them.
April 8th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Yeah, the primary benefit you can get from a blog is sharing your thoughts with the world. But the idea of this post was to show newbie and not-web-savvy bloggers what they can get *out* from their blogs as a direct benefit for their careers, reputation and knowledge.
Thanks for your comment!