Writing on a blog is a great experience, you can express your feelings, speak up, teach about some fields of knowledge or talk about things that people might find interesting.
I always talk about the importance of having the motivation to do things, blogging as a developer will bring some benefits to your career, I will mention the top five goals I always look forward to when blogging and maybe it'll give you some reasons why you should do it too.
1. Catharsis
Writing on your own blog gives you the freedom to express what you think in letters. Maybe you can't speak up on your house, on your job, on your college, but when writing on a blog you create your own space to open up your mind in a blog.
When I say what I want, I feel a freeman, so it's part of your personal development too. You always need to look for improving yourself, it's a necessity and the mind feels satisfied.
This motivation is too personal, and if you only have this as a goal when blogging, that's enough.
2. Personal branding
I like to have a good reputation, being known for my work, lifestyle, and way of thinking, so a blog talks a lot about yourself, it has pieces of your mindset that are built in this space. People can know you and make an image of what you are.
Personal branding is what you are and what you have to offer. Some other people will not feel comfortable with this, maybe they want to keep everything private so they become content consumers. Being a content consumer is definitely not bad, but building a personal brand is the opposite.
This is like companies having values, a landing page, a culture, etc. to keep or gain more customers. If you want to build a personal brand, this is specifically for followers, clients, or recruiters.
Talking about followers, this is a good way of networking. Once you express your ideas and people recognize you as a brand, you will find people with the same interests as you.
I have some recommendations on that, you will need to be consistent when writing on a blog, it's weird to have a web development blog and create a post about cooking. You build a community with the same hobbies or career paths to identify you as an influencer in a specific field.
In your community, you can find interesting people, people that will support you (others will criticize your work but even that's good) having feedback on what you write, and share tools that will benefit everybody, etc. I'm really proud to be part of the Hashnode community, and I've found great people that always support me and I support them.
4. Help others (and also yourself)
When you blog you can speak about anything you want, however, there's an unspoken law that tells you that you need to be constructive on what you blog. A blog is not a newspaper where you can speak bullshit or yellow journalism. In the end, you write for people that are interested in what you think and people feel identified or benefited by your words.
Being a developer is a tool you can use in your favor to help others. There are a lot of technical concepts people find hard to understand. You can clarify what you've learned or what your experience has told you and assist others with your knowledge.
Sometimes, that works the other way around. At least in my case, I've written a couple of technical blog posts, but that's not because I master them, it's because I've been dealing with them for a long time and I want to organize my ideas by writing them on a blog. I understand those topics betters and people will either help you out on improving them or they will say thank you because they have struggled too.
5. Monetize
This is the motivation people look forward to the most. Catalin Pit has talked about how you can make money as a developer, even though those are good ideas (I'm planning to do some of them) maybe that's not my highest motivation.
People like money, I like it too, but it's not my priority number one, I have understood that there are things more important than money, but in the end, we need money to survive and have the life we deserve.
My two cents here are that, if I have a catharsis, I build a good personal brand, I have a great community and help others, money will come due to the previous steps.
A recruiter will read my blog and will find it interesting, maybe a client will know how passionate I am for my developer job or who knows, in my community I can find a partner to build the next startup.
Consistency is a must, and blogging is a way to prepare me, the opportunity will come.
