Google Blogger for Dummies book report

Google Blogger for Dummies book report

Google Blogger for Dummies is a great starting book for the blogging beginner or a good reference source for the advanced blogger that is looking to get a little more out of their blog or maybe someone that wants to start using the blog to generate extra income. In any situation I think everyone can overall benefit from reading this book and pick up some new information and tools they can incorporate into their blogs. Google Blogger is a blogging site that is owned by Google and completely free to use.
This book starts out hitting on the basics of building a blog, it takes you through a step by step procedure on an account setup and creating a profile, along with pictures to guide you along. After your initial setup it explains all the features that are available to you with include your dashboard, templates, sidebar and gadgets. While walking you through how to use these tools to build your new blog it gives you a brief description on why you may want them on your blog, keep in mind not all of them may fit every single users blog, it’s a good thing to try a few out at a time see which fits your blog best.
I found this book to touch on four key things when starting your blogging adventure, they are: plan out your topic, driving traffic to your site, keeping your audience interested and communication.
Planning your blog is crucial. The first part being what you want your blog to be about, you want to pick a topic you are both interested in and know a good amount of information about. Picking a topic of interest will make you want to keep posting to your blog and having knowledge on the topic you can easily make posts without having to research each time.
Driving traffic to your site is very important because your audience or as we call them in the blog world followers, are what can make your blog successful. The more people that go to your blog and are interested in your topic and posts with most likely become a follower and then in turn then brings there followers to your site and can turn into a snowball effect in your favor, driving new traffic to your blog each day.
Keeping your followers interested is an ongoing task. Most bloggers normally post several times throughout the week. The more you post the more opportunities for your followers to read and comment on your posts and this opens up great lines of communication.
Which brings us to our last key feature communication. Communication if what drives the blog world, without communication their really wouldn’t be much need for blogs. Why would you spend your time posting and adding content to your blog if no one commented on it. First of all you wouldn’t know if anyone was even reading your blog and second how would you know if people found your content interesting. So in your posts it’s always good to include a few open ended questions that can be used to start up some dialog and get your readers involved. With that goes responding to your comments. If your readers are going to take the time to comment on your posts then you will want to follow up and respond to them, specifically if they are asking you questions. If you don’t keep a good dialog going your followers may not comment on your posts any longer and this could result in taking traffic away from your blog.
Another great feature for some bloggers can be the monetary gain. Google blogger allows you to put advertisements on your blog page. There are several different types to choose from. Most of them you will need to fill out a short application that must be reviewed to see if in fact your blog qualifies. The advertisements companies want to ensure they are paying money to people that have a lot of traffic visiting their blogs on a daily basis. Another thing to keep in mind is it’s good to have advertising of products that are in the same category as your blog, so if your blog is about pets, you probably don’t want to have ads about guns and tobacco. These ads can make you extra money but don’t expect to become rich overnight. It will take time and tracking to see what works best with your blog. The book gives you great examples of some free tracking tools for your blog.
Along with the key features, I liked this book because it a gave many third party sites and resources that you can go to and collect tools to post to your blog, most of free some may cost money but either way it’s your choice how involved you want to get. This book just shows you a little bit of each part of a blog, if there is any single part that you want to dive into more it suggests information and sources where you can find that information. I think this is great reading material for beginners but for someone that has had a blog for awhile they may want to just skip to a chapter of interest to get more sources where they can look on a specific topic of interest.