Brian from CopyBlogger has posted another excellent article to answer the question that he keeps getting from visitors: What’s in it for you? This is a great question. Have you ever read a great article on a web page or blog and wondered why the author is giving this stuff away for free? I know I have.

Brian makes a number of good points about why someone would do this. If you haven’t read any of his posts yet, or followed my links to his articles, you should take a look at his blog. There are so many great posts there that you’re sure to be coming back again and again. His blog is one that I check regularly and think about quite a bit after reading it.

The point of this particular article is to finally answer the question of why he is doing this. Readers have noted that he had no advertising on his blog (he does have some now) and that he hadn’t been attempting to sell anything. Usually, there is some sort of angle. There was quite a bit of speculation that he was building up to pitching some sort of copywriting product once his site reached a certain level of traffic. That wasn’t the reason he started this blog, though.

Brian gives several reasons why a person might start a blog:

You can make money from ads.

You can sell products.

You can sell services.

Or you can simply blog to meet cool people with great skills and great ideas and do business with them in a variety of ways.

He ends his post by revealing that he started his own blog for the last reason and that he’s already made some good contacts and built some lucrative working relationships. Mystery solved.

So, in the spirit of Brian’s post, why have I started this blog? Why do I continue to write here on a variety of topics? My answer might have been different a few months ago when I started my first blog. Then, I was just writing for practice and also to build contacts in the online writing world.

You may not know that I also write fiction and that it’s been a passion of mine to get some of my short stories published. I’ve been sidetracked this year for a number of reasons and haven’t been able to get anything published yet. Honestly, I haven’t been working much on my fiction lately, but it’s still something very important to me.

My blogging started out with no direct profit motive, but a desire to make contact with other people out there and also to force myself to write more often. This has worked out pretty well. I’ve made contact with a bunch of real, published writers. I’ve also met a lot of great people from all walks of life from all over the world and I’ve really benefited from the experience.

My goals for this blog have evolved a bit, though. This blog is now geared more toward exploring the world of ideas, finding ways to not only write better and to make money doing it, but to discover ways of living more fully and productively.

I write now on a variety of topics because I have a variety of interests, many of which I haven’t yet even touched on in this blog. This is my personal blog, but it’s also a place for me to share useful ideas with people who are searching for some of the same things.

One of my big goals right now is to find a way to become financially independent. I want to make money from the things I do online. I’m just starting to do this now and I want to share with you what I’m learning as I go along. I’ll share my mistakes so that you can avoid the same and I’ll share my successes so that you can do the same.

There are a million reasons why someone would start a blog. My biggest reason is to explore another world. I’ve learned an incredible number of things in the time that I’ve been blogging and I expect that I’ll learn much, much more as time goes by. I’ll be writing about that here and in other places, too. Stick with me and we’ll learn together.