What does a blog mean to you?

Last year August, I was for the umpteenth time looking for a meaning to my dreary life.

I have had a university education; I have been working for sometime (of course, the pay was terrible and in Africa of all places!); I had learnt to write and had published a few pieces at home and in America; I had dabbled a bit in commerce; I had read and practised the secret visualization techniques; short, I had tried things which get people out of the rut. But my life seemed to be glued down there in the ‘gutter’.

The internet which had made the likes of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame and ordinary marketers rich seemed to be my last hope. But search after search I had done on google had not returned the alibaba cave. I had almost given up entirely when, touching the bottom of despair, I did an ultimate search and chanced upon a firm’s ad to help people build blogs from which they could make money.

I was familiar with other websites but not blogs. I had built websites for my company and for myself but the idea that I could have a website to make money other than for advertising was completely new to me.

I saw this as an answer to my visualization to get rich. The idea of creating and running a blog as explained by the site I had chanced upon appealed greatly to me.

Doing business was a passion for me. Writing also. But both were proving trying. I didn’t have capital to order goods to sell (the African business mentality unfortunately is dominated by buy-and-sell). Efforts to get suppliers to send me goods on cash against documents (CAD) basis had proved futile. Suppliers find it difficult to count on complete strangers with whom they had never done business, and in Africa of all places where many unscrupulous people had swindled unsuspecting exporters. Besides, stiff competition from well-established writers made getting published in well-paying magazines seem like reaching for a distant star.

But here was someone telling me that I could create a blog free, get affiliate marketing companies to allow me to sell their physical and digital products on the site just for asking! Besides, using useful articles on the site could bring the visitors who may eventually become buyers. I no longer needed to satisfy anybody’s editorial whims to get published.

Wow!

At that moment a blog meant the medium which would allow me to exercise my passion for business and writing on my own terms and live well too.

A blog could mean a different thing/different things to other people. What is/are yours?