Successful Blogging — Book Review

Raise your hands if you need a blogging mentor! I believe in learning something new whenever I can, so when Annabel Candy announced her new Successful Blogging site and a shiny new ebook, also titled Successful Blogging in 12 Simple Steps (disclosure), I immediately stuck my hand up for a review copy. After all, even if you’ve been blogging for years, there’s always a chance that you’ve missed something.

Successful Blogging Contents and Summary

Successful Blogging is a 64-page, 12-step guide to blogging covering (the summaries are mine):

1. Topic & Goals — How to come up with a topic and sub-topics for your blog, with questions and worksheets to help you focus.

2. Branding — Brainstorming your brand, describing it and securing it.

3. Planning a blog — Design brief and content organization — pre-planning to save time later.

4. Blog set up — A quick tour of the main WordPress functions so you can get up and running fast.

5. Writing static content — How to brainstorm and write about pages and other static pages on your site.

6. Writing blog posts — Types of blog posts and headlines.

7. Writing for the web — Web writing, formatting and editing to make your blog posts great.

8. Reality check and adding value — Checking that everything you’ve done so far works; adding pillar content.

9. Blogging and other social media — A brief guide to getting started with Twitter and Facebook.

10. Online networking — Exactly what it says on the tin — starting out with networking online.

11. SEO, stats and rating progress — The behind the scenes stuff that can make or break your blog.

12. Guest posting — How to find and land guest posting opportunities.

There’s also a bonus chapter on motivation.

How The Book Works

Each chapter is clearly laid out and covers a couple of pages. The chapter content includes a thinking point, a hot tip (as in ‘here’s a way to make this work quickly’, an action point and a checklist to help you go over the content and apply it to your own blog. This is all based on Annabel’s actual experience of growing a blog from nothing to a well respected and often visited blog in its niche. She knows what she’s talking about, but takes the time to explain it in bite sized chunks so her readers will too. That’s why this is a great guide for someone completely new to blogging. There’s no chance that you will be overwhelmed.

SEO — Where Should It Be?

There’s just one area where I disagree with Annabel — and that’s where she places the chapter on SEO. Personally, I’d think about SEO right at the start, when choosing a domain name and before I write any content. That might be hindsight talking, though. When I started my first blog almost six years ago, I didn’t think about SEO till I’d already been blogging for months. And, to tell the truth, if you’re an experienced blogger, you can just dip into the SEO chapter when you think it’s right to do so.

Benefits For Experienced Bloggers

Notice how I mentioned experienced bloggers? That’s because I think we can gain something from this blog too. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I started my first blog (the blog that eventually became Get Paid to Write Online), I didn’t know enough about blogging to approach it in a systematic way. I know a lot more now, but it will be interesting to use Annabel’s lists to check my progress when I start my next blog.

Finally, all bloggers can benefit from Annabel’s tips on using guest blogging to promote their blogs and the extensive list of tools and resources at the end. To add to the value, there’s a great list of tools and resources at the end.

Grab A Copy of Successful Blogging

This ebook self study course on blogging is available in three options:

• Ebook and bonus chapter for $29

• Ebook, audiobook recording, bonus chapter and case studies for $39

• Ebook, audiobook recording, bonus chapter, case studies and two hour personal consultation for $499

Check it out for yourself! :)