“ProBlogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income” by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett is a practical guide on what it takes to build a strong, profitable blog. The authors are both professional bloggers – Darren is best known for his ProBlogger blog, and Chris can be found on his New Media blog at ChrisG.com – and in writing this book, they’re making their combined experiences available to us mere mortals to enable us to learn from them and to take our blogging to new levels.
The content of the book takes you right through from the basics of setting up your blog to all the various ways you can earn an income from blogging. It looks at buying and selling blogs for a profit, as well as how to promote your blogs effectively. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve pretty much covered everything you’d need to know to get into blogging full-time.
This book is ideal for all level of bloggers – whether you’re just starting out or already have an established blog. However, in my opinion it’s most appropriate for people who are looking to lift their blogging to a new, more professional level.
One of the reasons that I follow Darren’s ProBlogger blog is that I really enjoy his relaxed style of writing, as well as the good use he makes of lists (”Top 10 this” or “Best 5 that”, for example). This style has been carried through very effectively into the book in a way that makes it a very light and easy read, whilst still putting across great information. I particularly liked their thoughts on focusing on a niche, which really helped me to understand where I was going wrong with my own blog!
I think that the only challenge with a book like this is that with the speed that blogging technology changes, it can never really be considered 100% up to date. To give you an idea what I mean, the Wordpress examples use screenshots from version 2.3 and the current version is 2.9.1 (although with the rate that Wordpress comes out with new versions, that feels like just a few months…!) This however, will always be a problem with books focused around Internet Marketing technologies and in my opinion, the content is in-depth enough that anyone who takes the necessary action will be able to apply what Chris and Darren are teaching and relate it to today.
From my own perspective, I bought this book at a time when I was considering shutting down my blog. I was feeling unfulfilled, was struggling to find content and definitely wasn’t making any money! After reading the book, I realised that my main issue was that my focus was way to broad and my concept was something that I was becoming less and less interested in (technology for technology’s sake) which is why I switched my focus to Internet Marketing. This is something that I’m interested in and that passion makes it easier to do the other thing that I learned – blog regularly! (See my previous post for more on this)
Why Should You Buy This Book?
If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one (which I would strongly encourage you to do) then this book should be considered essential reading! Whatever level you’re at and regardless of how experienced you are, I’m convinced that you’ll find something in ProBlogger to improve your blogging.