Summer break is over and I am back to my favorite post type – book reviews. This time I want to share my thoughts about practical guide how to create, maintain and evolve a technical blog. This book covers all steps – plan, build, promote and scale.
Writing is not easy. Formulating ideas in a concise and clear matter requires efforts and time. But even if you are great in writing it is not enough to make you voice heard and opinions spread. There are around 600 millions blogs on the Internet today but only 32 millions are active. It means, that blogging is “easy to learn, difficult to master” thing.
When I decided to start my blog, I had close to none knowledge about how to do it. I knew how individual pieces of technology enable and simplify blogging, but I never tried to create one on my own. So, I had to find “installation manual”. Luckily, I came across Technical Blogging by Antonio Cangiano book that helped me tremendously.
The book focuses specifically on tech or close-to-tech blogs that distinguish it from thousands of other materials that mostly talk about personal blogs, online retail and etc. The book starts with guiding a reader through a planning phase and helps to find a proper niche, estimate audience and generate initial list of topics for your blog.
The next step is more technical – how to build a blog. Even if a WordPress (and the book’s focuses mostly on it) is super user friendly and straightforward, you better have more detailed explanation how key elements of the platform work, how they are integrated and etc. And the book does a good job in doing that.
The cornerstone of a blog – content – is covered in a great details. The books answers on questions how to find ideas for new posts, when and how often to post and other nuances. Probably, it is a key chapter of the book. Then the book concentrates on topic of a blog promotion via multiple sources and benefits of each of them. I have to say that I did not implement even a 30% of promotion advises. Some of them are outdated, others are not applicable for my niche, but you will find something useful for you for sure.
The last two chapters are about monetizing and scaling a blog, but for most of readers there will be long and effortful journey before they come to the need of finding additional authors or making money out of the blog.
If you are looking for a beginner guide how to start a blog, this book is for you. I rate if 5 out of 5.
Check out my other book reviews!