You don't really earn much or anything on resteems unless you're a big dog I guess, but if you resteem good authors....like this one, people will start to find you and the money moves all around when we're all connected. Your rep will go up, and that helps, but honestly, the main thing is to buy into steem by basically investing steem into steem power, which gives you more voting power, which gives authors more payout, and you a better rep in many cases. I say investing because it takes three months to convert steem power back into currency.