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Are you bemused by blogs? Eager to become a blogger? Google Blogger For Dummies can help you start blogging sooner than you think.
More than 14 million people are promoting a business, connecting with family and friends, and sharing opinions with Google Blogger. This book helps you start a Blogger account, create content, build an audience, make money from your blog, and more, all without learning to program. You’ll be able to:
Learn the parts of a blog, what Blogger does, and how to choose goals and blog topics
Choose a domain name, learn to use the dashboard, pick a template, and configure settings
Dress up your blog with themes and find out where to get plenty of free ones
Learn blogging etiquette and some secrets for long-term success
Make money from your blog with Google Adsense, contextual and text link ads, and merchandising with CafePress
Set up multi-user blogs or branch into mobile blogging, podcasting, or video blogging
Take advantage of social networking sites and learn simple search engine optimization techniques
Maintain your blog with tools like Blog This! and Quick Edit
Moderate comments effectively, track your stats, and more
Google Blogger is a great choice for beginning bloggers, and Google Blogger For Dummies gives you the know-how to venture confidently into the blogosphere.
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Here's what you need to know to get started with Google Blogger
Want to share your opinions, promote your business, network with others, and maybe pick up a few extra dollars, all without learning to program? Millions of people are doing it with Google Blogger, and you can too. This book helps you create a Blogger account, write compelling content, build an audience, make money from your blog, and more!
What's a blog, and what's Blogger? — learn the parts of a blog, what Blogger does, and how to choose goals and blog topics
Nuts and bolts — choose a domain name, learn to use the dashboard, pick a template, and configure settings
Blog effectively — learn blogosphere etiquette and some secrets for long-term success
Fun bells and whistles — dress up your blog with templates (lots of them are free!)
Does making dollars make sense? — explore options for Google Adsense®, contextual and text link ads, paid posts, and merchandising with CafePress
Spread the word — promote your blog through search engines and social networking sites
A family of blogs — set up multi-user blogs or branch into mobile blogging, podcasting, or video blogging
Get more Google — use Picasa®, YouTube, Feedburner, and more
Open the book and find:
How to choose a blog topic and personalize your blog
What you should know about moderating comments
How to maintain your blog with tools like Blog This! and Quick Edit
Simple search engine optimization techniques
Tips for tracking your blog traffic
Where to find cool free templates
How to make money from your blog
Ten useful social networking sites
About the Author
Susan Gunelius is President and CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a full-service marketing communications provider. She is also a professional blogger and seasoned marketing and branding expert with two other books to her credit. In addition to being the Guide to Web Logs for About.com, she authors blogs for a variety of clients as well as her own blogs, WomenOnBusiness.com and KeySplashCreative.com.
Product Details
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (February 3, 2009)
Susan Gunelius is President and CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications provider offering content marketing, branding, copywriting, social media marketing services. Her clients include Citibank, Cox Communications, About.com (a New York Times company), and a variety of large and small organizations around the world.
Several of Susan's books are used in university classrooms. As a professional speaker, Susan lectures professionals and students across the globe about marketing, social media, branding and more. She has also been interviewed by a wide variety of television, radio, print, and online media organizations about marketing-related topics.
Susan is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, FoxBusiness.com, WashingtonPost.com, BusinessWeek.com, and many more.
With 20 years of marketing, branding, and copywriting experience, Susan is a seasoned corporate professional having spent much or her career developing and executing marketing programs for global and national organizations, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC.
SUSAN GUNELIUS' WEBSITES, BLOGS AND PROFILES: www.KeySplashCreative.com www.WomenOnBusiness.com www.SusanGunelius.com Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/susangunelius Friend me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/susangunelius Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/susangunelius
First Line: So you made the decision to start a blog.
This is a decision that thousands, if not millions, of people have made. If Google Blogger is the blogging platform chosen, how much help isGunelius' book? A lot!
From Part I where the author describes Blogger's features and compares it to other blogging software, Gunelius takes the reader step-by-step through opening a Google account, starting a blog, choosing a template, writing and publishing blog posts-- everything a beginning blogger should know.
From the basics, she moves on to covering how to monetize a blog, blogging from different media such as podcasting and mobile phones, how to use social media such as Twitter to network and build a community, and how to obtain your own domain. There's even a section for troubleshooting problems. Everything is written in clear, concise language and easy to follow instructions.
People who have been blogging for a while may wonder if Google Blogger for Dummies contains anything worthwhile for them. My answer would be yes. For example, I had questions about obtaining my own domain, just what does "bounce rate" mean, and how to increase my search engine ranking. This book answered all those questions and many others. This book is for everyone using Blogger, both novice and pro.
The "Dummies" franchise is notoriously uneven with lots of low-quality titles and a relatively few good ones. "Google Blogger For Dummies" is a winner.
Susan Gunelius effortlessly walks the reader through the history of blogs and Blogger, in particular, the mechanics of starting, maintaining and growing a blog and ehnhancing your blog with templates, widgets, elements and gadgets. Then Gunelius segues into "Making Money with Blogger".
This section is surprisingly well done and thorough. It lists a number of resources for monetizing your blog and has a pretty detailed discussion of Google's AdSense program. Gunelius then moves on to networking and relationship building.
All in all, Susan Gunelius has turned out a very usable guide to getting started with Google Blogger, growing into as sophisticated a blog as you like and, if you are so moved (and have enough traffic), monetizing and growing it. Good work. Do remember that this guide is oriented toward Blogger beginners.
I've had my blog up and running for a couple of weeks and decided to get this book to help fill in some gaps in what I had learned on my own. I was not disappointed.
It is easy to just take a chapter at a time and you can skip around as needed. It is a great reference book. I have a Kindle and started to buy that version, but decided to go with the hardcopy. This was a good call as I have highlighted and dog-eared a lot of the pages so I can easily flip to sections I need to reference.
While you can learn a lot about Blogger online, I find it helpful on my eyes to get away from the computer screen every now and then and read a "real" book. Also, there aren't many books exclusively devoted to Blogger (like this one)so this was also a real plus.
One of the ways the book helped me the most, was in creating a unique domain name for my blog. I wanted to have a url that didn't have the .blogspot.com at the end of it. The author walked me through the steps and it took all of 5 minutes! This alone saved me a lot of time and was worth the price of the book. [...]
