About.com Rating
The Bottom Line
If you're looking to start writing a blog for your business or just for yourself, Google Blogger for Dummies is a great book to help get you started. Google Blogger for Dummies by Susan Gunelius (the About.com Guide to Weblogs) takes you through all the steps you need to start a Google Blogger blog and then make it useful to you and your company.
Pros
- Takes you through all the steps to build and maintain a Blogger blog
- Includes making money and growing your blog
- Good for beginners and blogging experts as well
- Non-technical tone makes it very easy for beginners
Cons
- Some people don't like the "For Dummies" style
Description
- Chapters 1-3: Introduction to Google Blogger including the "blogosphere" and other jargon.
- Chapters 4-9: Setting up a Google Blog and basic maintenance.
- Chapters 10-11: Make money with your Blogger blog.
- Chapters 12-13: Get more readers for your blog.
- Chapter 14: Setting up more than one blog on Blogger and converting a blog to a team effort with many writers.
- Chapter 15: Mobile blogging, podcasting, and video blogging.
- Chapter 16: Advanced Blogger tricks like domains, third-party hosts, and publishing by FTP.
- Chapters 17-19: The part of tens: 10 social networking sites, 10 Blogger problems and solutions, and 10 free theme pages.
Guide Review - Google Blogger for Dummies by Susan Gunelius
When I first picked up this book, I didn't think it was going to be useful to me because I've been using Blogger and other blog software tools for nearly 10 years now.
But this book is much more than just a book for Blogger novices. The first 9 chapters are for beginners, but there are 10 additional chapters in the book (7 if you leave out the "Part of Tens" for Dummies standard section). And these chapters are perfect.
For beginners, this book is great because it takes you through the steps to create a Blogger blog, write for your blog, use a nice template, and even add new gadgets to make it more interesting. And once you've gotten your blog to that point, you're ready for the more advanced chapters on making money and growing your audience.
I was a little disappointed that the "Moving Beyond Blogger" chapter was more about using Blogger on a different Web server than it was about really moving beyond Blogger to other things. But since the topic of the book is Blogger, this isn't terribly surprising. And the features that this chapter covers are important to most business bloggers and security-conscious individuals.
06/25/09