Creating Personal Wealth with Blogs
Currently the discussion is going on how to make money with blogs and I do believe the discussion is flawed. First of all, we have to remove from the discussion group blogs or subject focussed blogs that have been launched partly to make money. They have a standard problem like any media company has and they are just using a blogging tool as their content management system. This is not what this should be about…
What I am talking about is the standard blogs, by people, by groups, as a labor of love, of dedication. These that don’t want to be a media company, those that don’t want to go managing their cash flow. For those, there is a lot broader of a picture.
[Jeremy C. Wright](http://www.ensight.org/) has somehow become a source of authority about Google and is moving closer to his dream of working at Microsoft, via blogging. Joi Ito, venture capitalist, has been thinking to focus more on blogging, both in business and in his personal life. Ingmar Bornholz is taking the idea as far as to think about an open company via his blog and he just started. Loic le Meur started a bit over a year agoa and just set up the World Economic Forum Blog. Ralf Beuker is blogging his teacher life and set up a group blog for his Design Management course. Jeremy Zawodny is using his blog to find new employees for Yahoo! and educated the world by blogging his housing hunt and buying.
This list could go on and on, but these people have a few things in common. they are not making money vie their blog as such but thy are creating wealth. Wealth for society at learge and for themselves. Far beyond monetary wealth.
This is what this is about. This is why this is a lot deeper than simply making money with blogs. Loic le Meur wouldn’t have to build up another company but first of all I think he can’t not do it and second, which is the important point, is building somethingthat can change society for the btter.
We are moving to power back to the people with this. The media amazing power and will continue to have that but this is like enabling a counter weight. The question here would be how the individual would value having her voice heard? The internet is not about control, but about the free flow of information, enabling a lot of view points to be out there and public and for open discussion to take place. It will be and is uncontrollable and shouldn’t be. Yes, some radical views will be out there too but there will be a discussion about them.
How do you value sometimes possibly getting financial and personal reward for getting sombody a job? How do you value building up your name through sudden interviews with the press? How do you value getting your dream job? How do you value getting eedback from fellow MBA students at a meeting tell you they love your blog showing print outs which they read on the way to the meeting? How do you value helping somebody with a problem they have?
Most importantly, in a world where the power is moving back to the employee, the employee willing to take more risk and take charge of their own life, moving arround easily and readily and not being bound down by one corporation? My knowledge isn’t in here but the depth of it can be guessed and seen and I will be more likely to be approached for a job that I would care about than anything else.
This is where the value of blogging comes from and this cannot be measured with money alone. Money will only allow you to do this without cost and this can be done with a free blogging service too. If you want more power of expression, you might have to pay for more powerful software, but then you have a view of yourself that is a lot clearer and you will be willing to pay for that. The meetings I had with people through this blog are already worth a lot more than the money I pay for my TypePad account. And this is only the beginning.
Welcome to your power.