Good overall primer on blogging
Darren Rowse and Chris Garret draw upon their wealth of experience with blogs and give us this comprehensive blogging primer.
While the book is mostly focused on making money from blogs, it starts from the beginning: by explaining what is a blog and how to set one up. This takes about three chapters (if you have already started a blog, you can just skim through those sections).
Intermediate bloggers will enjoy the book more from chapter 4 on, when Darren and Chris talk about how and what to write (helpful to overcome the all-too-common "writer's block") and how to make money from your blog (both directly, like with advertising, and indirectly, as with partnerships, speaking engagements, etc).
The last few chapters deal with a topic that was completely new to me: buying and selling blogs. Darren and Chris do a very good job at spelling out the caveats you must take into account when buying and selling blogs, to avoid scams and costly mistakes.
The comprehensive nature of this book makes it difficult for the authors to go into much detail about any particular topic. The good news is that Darren's blog [...] is chock full of how-to articles that may give you the specific information that you won't find in the book.
Overall, I found this book to be a very good blogging primer, one that I will keep in my bookshelf for future and constant reference.
Best yet!
This is by far, the best book on this subject I have read. The authors give a lot of hands on information and guide the reader step by step through the process. A must read for the person who wants blog for money or their business!
Problogging book and the six figure income really
I am a huge fan of Darren's problog web site, and he is an excellent resource for people of all stages of blogging to use as a resource. The thing that sets him apart from many bloggers is that he tries everything he is talking about. You won't find as much hype as you would think you would from the title of the book, he has really tried all this stuff, and his parent holding company b5media also uses his ideas on how to make a better blog. Blogging is hard work, you have to learn to use words to tell a story, and yes you can over time build up your blogging skills and make a six figure income from it, people do it, and people have done it.
The best section of the book is "creating something worthwhile", and that is the hardest part of being a blogger, how do you create value for an audience you might never meet? The worst section was the bit about buying and selling blogs, while it can be done, and has been done successfully, much like any other property you might buy, there are already a lot of speculators out there, and it might not be the best thing you can do with your money. Working for blog networks is also another way of making money and often can be very profitable (I write for a number of blog networks and profit from them). After blogging for five years myself, I still found the book overall full of interesting bits that I missed on his web site, and that alone made it worth the read.
Rated five of five stars, it offers a realistic portrayal of the blogging industry, and might just be something that people will want to check out if this is a direction that they want to go in.
Well Written - Provides A Good Foundation
Motivational, enjoyable and easy to read. This book provides a wide range of useful information for someone getting into blogging for the first time or for someone who has basic experience blogging and is now ready to take it to the next level.
The sections on starting up your blog and creating quality content were very helpful and well written. Excellent guidance on structuring blog posts and other content.
One area that seemed rather short on concrete detail was blog traffic and the impact of relative levels of traffic on the success of the blog, especially with regards to monetization.
Some advertising systems require at minimum of 10,000 pageviews per day, some dramatically more, before allowing you to run their ads on your blog. Even Google's AdSense program is not without its challenges. Level setting on blog traffic for blog newbies with some real world examples would have been helpful.
Overall, the authors did an excellent job and I would strongly recommend ProBlogger as a starting point to anyone new to blogging or looking to monetize an existing blog.
Blog Your Brain
This is a great step by step guide about what it takes to make money in blogging. It's a slow process and this is reinforced throughout the text. No secret formulas but great instructions on how to succeed. It takes work folks - sad but true.
Well written and an easy read. Recommended for internet marketers, writers and bloggers and anyone thinkning about starting a blog. Read this first.
(36 reviews)
