As a blogger what rewards do you get from what you are doing? Obviously lots of pro-bloggers do what they do for the monetary rewards and/or reputation building. But is this the only thing that you’ll get from blogging, and more importantly are these the valuable things you’ll get out of blogging? I would be a hypocrite to say that the additional income from pro-blogging is something I love to spend but looking at the long run I think the other rewards far outweigh the monetary gains.

A couple of treasures blogging has brought me:

Knowledge – Needing to come up with a new post regularly has kept me on my toes and pushed me to read and read and read in order to come up with new material. Undoubtedly learning will still continue if I didn’t blog but on lazy days wanting and needing to share something to my readers pushes me to keep on learning.

New friends – Though most people you interact with online stays as simple online acquaintances I am fortunate to have a handful who I now consider to be real friends with a couple of them I’ve actually met. Comment discussions have turned to emails, phone calls, and dinner. The funny thing is that these friends are now people I keep in touch with more than some of my older friends, although interaction is still mostly through our blogs! Note though that these new friends are readers of my personal blog and not the topical ones.