Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett 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 (problogger.net) 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.
This is a GREAT book for people new to the blogosphere. I bought a copy purely to support Darren and Chris because I read their blogs daily, however was pleasantly surprised that it was fresh content and not just a rehash of what they blog on.
Good stuff to buy for someone just getting into blogging.