How to Get the Most Out of This Book

Before proceeding with this journey, I feel it’s important to highlight how this book is intended to be read.

If you don’t have a blog yet, it’s worth reading this book from cover to cover, as you’ll be provided with a complete set of steps that you can take to become a successful blogger. After reading each chapter, write down the steps you plan to undertake for your site. To take full advantage of the book, you must actively put at least some of the advice housed within it into action.

If you already have a blog, you’ll still benefit from reading the book in its entirety, but doing so is not quite as mandatory. You can focus on the chapters that interest you right now and come back to others whenever you need assistance with a specific topic.

Regardless of whether you’re a new blogger or not, think of blogging as an experiment. You’ll try suggestions from this book, and many of them will work for your blog (though a few might not). By using traffic statistics and user feedback, you’ll be able to validate what works for you and what doesn’t. Then iterate, constantly improving your blog with small enhancements. As you gain more experience, you’ll be able to test your own theories to discover what helps your blog grow.

Remember that everything we do as bloggers is intended to showcase our content. Yet this book contains many chapters that focus on other aspects of blogging. These other chapters are necessary because they’ll help you maximize your ability to promote and benefit from your content. As you approach each chapter, however, you should remember the mantra “Content first.” The underlying assumption throughout this book is that you’re reading these pages with the intent of producing the best content you can.

If you’ve already read the first edition of this book, welcome back. The world has changed in the past five years, and so have some of my blogging recommendations. I’m confident that you’ll find the updates throughout the book, and the additional content, well worth reading this second edition for.

This book contains a lot of screenshots, which are designed simply to show you what each site referenced looks like. The actual text on these images is not important, so we’ve resized them to fit your ereader.

This book is written in the belief that each of us has something worth sharing. Each of us has a blogger within. I’m here to help you let your blogger out.