Title: Blog, Inc.: Blogging for Passion, Profit, and to Create Community Author: Joy Deangdeelert Cho, Meg Mateo Ilasco
Links: Bookshop (affiliate link) |Goodreads
Rating:
Summary: Mostly too basic or too advanced for me, but I still enjoyed how much it made me think.
This book starts you right at the beginning, with helpful advice for picking a blog topic, a title, and a blogging platform. While these are obviously things I already have, I still appreciated these sections. I thought the author had some great advice. She made me revisit a lot of my original choices to decide if I was still happy with them. I think we can all use that kind of prompting every once in a while! As someone who started blogging almost 4 years ago, I really should be asking myself if all my original blogging choices are a good fit for me.
The author doesn’t talk at all about book blogging. She comes from the lifestyle blogger world and that’s clear in her choices of examples and bloggers to interview. That didn’t make her advice irrelevant to me though! Sometimes I did feel a little left out, but overall, I think I learned even more because she came from a slightly different perspective than I do. She certainly talked about monetization and sponsors in a way that seems to be very rare in the book blogging world. Some of her monetization ideas felt like a bad fit for me for that reason. Others felt too advanced – I’m definitely not to the point where I’m treating my blog as a business! She also had some ideas that I think could work for me though. Even though I’m obviously not blogging for the money (if I were, I wouldn’t blog about books!), I wouldn’t complain at all if I could make a little pocket change from a hobby I love.
Even though I wasn’t the target audience for this book, I felt as though I got a lot out of it. I would, of course, highly recommend it to bloggers for whom it’s a better fit – new or aspiring bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, and those looking to get serious about blogging as a career. However, I would also recommend it to fellow book blogging veterans. It’s a thought-provoking read that will cause you to revisit your early blogging choices and give you a slightly different perspective on blogging.
Charlene @ Bookish Whimsy
I’ve just been thinking about monetizing the blog and advertising – whether or not I should try some of the options out there, so this might be helpful to me for that. Although of course I’ll still keep the day job! 🙂 This seems like a great book for a lifestyle blogger though, so I’m glad as a book blogger you were able to get something out of it!
DoingDewey
It sounds like we’re in a similar place! I’ll have to see if there are any books about blogging by book bloggers and/or for bloggers who want to improve their blogs and make a little money, without treating their blog like a business. Like you, I’m not looking to replace my day job!
Geoff W
This definitely sounds interesting, but I love what you say about it being too simple and too advanced. It’s like the story of my life when it comes to blogging, I’m just sort of chugging along in the middle of the road and enjoying what I’m doing and that’s okay with me.
DoingDewey
I’m also in the middle of the road with my blog, I think, but I’m not sure I’m happy with that. I’d like to be able to see improvement of some kind with my blog or at least growth and change. I think focusing on stats makes me feel dissatisfied though, so my current plan is to work on increasing my interactions with other bloggers instead of trying to get more followers or pageviews or something like that 🙂
Shay
I read this one shortly after I started my blog and found it pretty helpful. I looked through it again recently, but had a similar reaction to you, where I felt that it didn’t have much in the middle between beginner and professional.
DoingDewey
I’ll have to look for other books on blogging, because this one really wasn’t a great fit for where I am with my blog. Although I enjoyed revisiting the earlier stuff and day-dreaming about having a big enough blog to make a career out of it, I think there are probably other books that would be more helpful.