As you know I received a request to review a book on Google’s Blogger platform from Packt Publishing a couple of months ago. About 3 weeks ago I mentioned this to you and gave you my first impressions of the book which where completely positive. This book is very detailed on many aspects of blogging.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is perfect for someone that is just starting out blogging or has been blogging for a while but is unsure of how to take their blog to the next level with a customized theme and growing their reader base.

Getting Started

The book starts out by introducing Georgia Peach, a fanatical fruitier. We get a look at who Georgia is, what her business is, and that she has started blogging in hopes of increasing sales and creating a small community atmosphere among her customers.

Although that may sound corny, it shows the beginner blogger how to get their blog off the ground. It also shows us that there really are no barriers in blogging. You just need to be passionate about what you are writing about.

The key points of this chapter are focused on planning. That’s right. Before you even type a word you should have a clear plan in place for your blog. What do you want to accomplish? What is your target audience? What is the underlying theme of your blog? What are the goals of your blog? And ultimately, how are going to achieve those goals?

Time To Pimp Your Blog

You might assume, based on the title of this book, that it will be all about customizing and using Blogger. This simply is not the case. The book dedicates a couple of chapters to customizing Blogger and there are a few scattered looks at specific features related to various chapters but the bulk of the information in this book can be applied to any blogging platform to generate success.

With that being said, chapter 2 is all about customizing your Blogger template and making your blog you own. Having a unique blog is key to standing out from the millions of other bloggers and showing potential readers that you are worth their time to read what you have to say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that packaging doesn’t matter because it is critical.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to looking at the widgets that are available to you to make your blog more interactive and personal.

Beyond these two chapters the rest of the book is dedicated to promoting your blog and positioning yourself for success.

Social Networking

Chapter 3 gives us an introduction to social media and how it can be used to drive traffic and build our reader base. We get a look sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and lots more and how they can be used to promote our content to existing and new readers.

There isn’t a whole lot I can say about this except that it is an important area and that you really should not ignore it or you may be missing out on hundreds or even thousands of potential readers.

RSS, Link Building, and SEO

An RSS feed is a great tool for your readers to stay up to date on what you are doing and saying without having to visit your blog every few hours to see if they missing anything.

Your reader will take the URL of your RSS feed and enter it into their RSS reader, like Google Reader or News Gator. This will allow them to see all the new updates you post to your blog in their reader, along with all the other feeds they are following, without having to go out to each individual site.

Offering your readers an RSS feed is very important and it should be placed prominently and made very noticeable so your readers can easily find it.

Chapter 6 covers what you need to know about RSS and some features of blogger that help you make your feed available.

Chapter 4 covers a crucial topic, link building. Your blogs failure or success hinges on backlinks. Without them you will not rank in search engine results and you will not be see by the Internet as a whole. Basicially a backlink is a link from an eternal web page to your site. This is what search engines use to determine your blog’s authority level and rankings for certain keywords.

Chapter 9 looks at SEO, search engine optimization. Link building is a form of SEO, but he core of SEO is making sure your blog is configured to perform it’s best in search results. This includes focusing your content on the keywords you want to rank for and tweaking your template’s code to make it easy for search engines to index and evaluate.

Conclusion

I want to wrap this up before it grows even longer. Sorry about that. I wanted to present a concise overview of this book but there is just so much great content in this book that it is hard to do in only a few words.

Some other areas that this book covers, that I won’t go into detail about, are making money through advertising, measuring performance with Google Analytics, and integrating your blog with your existing website.

These are all good topics but I just don’t have the time to talk about them.

Over all this book as a great spring board to get new bloggers launched and on their way to being successful with their blogs. I highly recommend this book and hope that you will take the time to pick it up and give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.