Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions) (Paperback)

by Lee Jordan (Author)
Key Phrases: page elements, dashboard overview, site feed, Google Analytics, The Fall Fruit, New Post (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Detail

Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs.

It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features including RSS feeds, link-backs, photo slideshows, and integration with popular Google applications like Picasa. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will focus on transforming a typical blog into something fresh and professional that stands out from the crowd. It starts with an introduction to an example blog, discussing what it is lacking, and then adding all the features of Blogger to make it successful. This book will tell you how to transform a slow-paced typical business blog into an attractive and interactive profit-making blog with measurable results. It has a very user-friendly approach and shares tips, tricks, and resources to continue to grow your blog.

What you will learn from this book?

The book aims to be a "complete" guide to working with Blogger. The focus is on more advanced, professional uses. You will learn everything you need to know to extend your blog and grow beyond the basics of using Blogger. This book will cover the following:

• Customizing and creating templates to make your blog attractive
• Adding social bookmarks to your blog to promote your site
• Joining the blogosphere to drive traffic to your site
• Customizing your blog by using widgets effectively
• Customizing your blog's RSS and Atom feed, so that the Blogger feeds are available to the users
• Managing ads and adding e-commerce features
• Monitoring viewers and ads using Google Analytics
• Managing and optimizing your blog for search engines
• Integrating your website with your blog

Approach

Written in a clear, easy-to-read style, the book takes you through the essential tasks required to create a feature-rich blog as quickly as possible. From initial setup to customizing modules, each task is explained in a clear, practical way using an example blog developed through the book. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools.

This book deals with using the current Blogger and third-party tools to optimize and create widgets for your blog. You'll transform your blog using existing tools then take it further with more challenging approaches to customizing your blog. All the steps involved in each example are listed under the section called "Time for action". Similarly, the results of that action are listed under the section called "What just happened". This structure adds to the clear, simple, and focused approach of the book.

Who this book is written for?

The book is aimed at current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Blogger and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger. Blog owners who promote their own services, expertise, and products, and want to increase their blog's success by pushing the limits of what Blogger can do will get the most out of this book.

The book doesn't require any specific knowledge of Blogger or the related technologies: RSS, CSS, HTML, and XML. Everything you need to know to grow beyond the basics is covered in this book. The companion website to this book (bloggerbeefedup.blogspot.com) includes free resource images and content.

About the Author
Lee Jordan

Lee Jordan is a web developer with a large collection of web technology acronyms on her resume that sound like the names of laundry detergents and cause glazed expressions in school children. She designs and maintains internal and external enterprise-level websites and web-based applications as part of a project team for a privately held technical services company. Her work includes proposing, writing, and editing web content and user guides people actually read. She began her career in 1997 as a web designer after graduating from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she swears that she missed at least one home football game while in the computer lab. Lee later convinced Seminole Community College to give her a Web Programming degree in 2003, even though her final project was a Java-based application that actually contained a usable help file.

Lee Jordan

Lee Jordan is a web developer with a large collection of web technology acronyms on her resume that sound like the names of laundry detergents and cause glazed expressions in school children. She designs and maintains internal and external enterprise-level websites and web-based applications as part of a project team for a privately held technical services company. Her work includes proposing, writing, and editing web content and user guides people actually read. She began her career in 1997 as a web designer after graduating from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she swears that she missed at least one home football game while in the computer lab. Lee later convinced Seminole Community College to give her a Web Programming degree in 2003, even though her final project was a Java-based application that actually contained a usable help file.

Web development topics or whatever she can think of at the time are posted on her blog at leejordan.net

Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184719317X
• ISBN-13: 978-1847193179
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,505 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Resource!, September 14, 2008

By	In Pursuit of Proverbs 31 "Amy Bayliss" (Cajun Country) - See all my reviews

This book by Lee Jordan is perfect for the novice blogger and packed with must have info for even the seasoned blogger. While it particularly deals with the Blogger (Google) platform, a good bit of the information extends beyond Blogger to services and tips that could be used for a variety of platforms.

I love the approach Jordan uses - taking a sample blog that is plain in nature and allowing the reader to follow that blogs evolution to a more professional looking blog using the guidelines and tips offered in the book.

Jordan shows you why popular blogs are so popular and what you can do to enhance your ratings and most importantly, your readership. He leaves no stone unturned as he divulges all the tricks of the trade, er uh, hobby.

Whatever the purpose of your blog is you should invest in this tool. It easy to understand, simple to follow, and indexed for ease of locating information. I have used it many times in the last few weeks to look up a particular subject and implement the information given.

Here is a list of the chapters:

1. All Blogs Are Not Created Equal
2. Customize and CreateTemplates
3. Social Bookmarking
4. Joining the Blogosphere
5. Using Widgets
6. RSS and Atom Syndication
7. Making Money With Ads
8. Measuring Site Performance with Google Analytics
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Website Integration

Oh and it comes in paperback or e-book form!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars look at the social bookmarking aspects of Blogger, June 1, 2008

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

So this is what Google offers? Like most of what it presents to a general audience, the cost is free. How good is it? Pretty good. All the basic abilities you could reasonably expect are there. Starting with a top-down template approach. Where you, the owner of a website that you want to have a blog in, can quickly choose between several popular candidate formats. Each having numerous customisable parameters. So it is trivial to define the name of your blog, and give it a short general description and, possibly, an accompanying image. This could be of yourself, for example. Or of your band, if the blog will be for the band.

I'm not lightly raising the previous example either. Google is in competition with other social networks. A major opponent is Myspace, which is a big music hangout. Yet if you are a band dissatisified with what Myspace lets you do, Google Blogger might be more flexible. Think about it, anyway.

Blogger also goes beyond just making the graphics. This being from Google, it has the means to hook up to data streams. Social bookmarking. If you are indeed serious about making a widely read blog, then pay very careful attention to these sections of the book. There are already millions of blogs on the Web. Most get very little traffic. With this in mind, Blogger has useful tools. That might let you share posts by email, in an attempt to pursue viral marketing.

There is also advice on how to position your blog so that search engines [and presumably Google in particular] might treat it favourably in organic rankings. Given that Blogger comes from Google, take heed.

At the most basic level, the book advises you to write as well as you can. Write articles that are original and interesting. Ultimately, this will be the biggest factor in attracting a wide audience. Keep in mind that Blogger [and every other blogging package] cannot help you with this. It provides a framework within which to write. But as always, in the end you are on your own.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning to Blog "Right" with a little help, August 10, 2008

By	Abhishek Kant "http://www.abhishekkant.net" (Delhi, India) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Blogging is easy - blogging right is difficult! A little help is always useful if you are planning to blog right.. The book "Blogger - Beyond the Basics" by Lee Jordan proved to be my bridge from blogging to blogging brilliantly..

The book is for users who have just entered the blogging field and would like to create a name for themselves in the blogosphere. The book quickly ramps you up from beginner to an advanced level user with ability to derive maximum out of your blog.

This book is for those who want to use Google's Blogging platform - Blogger. However, many tips in the book go beyond blogger and are generally useful for anyone. This is the first book that i have found in the market that covers blogging. Frankly I have also thought about writing a book on blogging but never went beyond the initial TOC.

The key to blogging (as you may have heard) is content. Without appealing content, a blog will not get readers. This book is about getting the platform right so that your content can create maximum impact. At one place in Chapter 9 the author does provide interesting suggestions on how to discover content that you could be writing based on the keywords.

The book starts by introducing a fictional business that wants to ensure its social presence in Chapter I. The next chapter logically...

Read more at: http://www.abhishekkant.net/2008/08/book-review-blogger-beyond-basics.html