Is Having a Blog Conducive to One's Professional Development?

Towards the early part of my career in the industry, I was reading lots of articles on the web, as I had developed the habit of constantly educating myself about recent trends and modern technologies. Some of these articles came from social media (mainly LinkedIn), while others (the majority of them) stemmed from various blogs.

Before that time I had a very negative impression of blogs, since the only blogs I knew of were those created and maintained by people who didn't have much to say. Some of them were entertaining, but most of them didn't add much value to my information feed. However, upon reading some articles on what I came to call "professional blogs" I changed my mind.

Professional blogs are blogs that have a professional agenda and are managed in a somewhat professional manner. People writing in such blogs respect their audience and use the blog as a means to share experiences and information in general that the reader may find useful for their career or their education. These are not places where people vent about things that pissed them off or that they just don't like. Professional blogs opt to add value to the reader's experience and urge him or her to engage with the author of the blog post, or at the very least express their satisfaction about its validity or veracity.

Professional blogs are also conducive to one's personal brand. It's one thing writing a short blurb about yourself on your profile on LinkedIn or beBee, and it's a completely different story if you regularly create content that you publish on a site that you manage, even if it is on a Wordpress platform, so you don't need to do any coding. Everyone has something to say nowadays, especially when it comes to their personal brand. Not everyone, however, has something to say that adds value to whoever reads it and helps them understand the person behind the professional persona.

In my experience, having a blog helped me find my voice as a writer and as a content creator in general. Although I realize that I still have a long way to go before I can consider myself a professional blogger, I find that the blog that I maintain has added some value to my personal brand, while there is a fairly steady following, which has grown organically over the past few months, since I made the blog available to the public.

What's your experience with blogging? Do you find posting on Steemit congruent to professional development, like a professional blog is? I look forward to reading your views on the matter.