Book Review: Blogger -- Beyond the Basics

If you write a blog on Google’s Blogger platform—or ever have any plans to—you need to pick up a copy of Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions) by Lee Jordan. This is the definitive guide to planning, designing, pimping out, promoting, monetizing, measuring and SEO-ing a Blogger blog.

The book explains the techniques to accomplish all of these objectives through the fictional story of Georgia Peach, a woman passionate about fresh fruit. Procedures are illustrated using examples from Georgia planning, developing and promoting her Fruit for All blog.

The story begins with Georgia researching competitive and related blogs, planning her strategy, and then customizing a Blogger template to create just the look she’s after by replacing the header image, modifying fonts and colors, changing the layout and customizing the sidebar. Along the way, the author cites helpful tools such as text editors (HTML Kit, Arachnophilia, Dreamweaver) and color tools (Color Hunter, transparent color generator, VisiBone colors by shade).

Next, she makes her blog posts easy to share using social media badges and other techniques, such as turning on Email Post Links within Blogger. Social media buttons are common, but the author provides an easy coding technique to automatically collect the dynamic information for the bookmark service, so that when the button is clicked, the attributes in the tag will automatically populate the title and URL boxes.

As the story of Georgia's blog continues, her experiences provide illustrative examples of routine, advanced and just plain cool features like:

activating backlinks and trackbacks
creating a blogroll
adding a Twitter widget
replacing a blogger profile with a Facebook badge (very cool)
providing PayPal service for e-commerce
selecting and building widgets
creating separate RSS feeds based on post labels
adding an outside RSS feed to a blog
integrating a video player
setting up a Google AdSense for Search box
displaying AdSense adds in RSS feeds using FeedFlare
creating a customized Recommended Product ad from Amazon's affiliate program
using advanced traffic reporting features in Google Analytics

and more. If it's possible to do something in Blogger, you can probably find step-by-step instructions for the task in this book.

There's very little to not like about this book. The writing style gets a bit cutesy at times, but never crosses the line into annoying. The section on search optimization is elementary, but that's more because of the inherent SEO limitations of the Blogger platform than any fault of the author.

As the major blogging platforms have evolved, WordPress has become the more feature-rich tool, but Blogger puts all of the basic functionality into an easier-to-use package. For writers who choose to use this platform, Lee Jordan's Blogger is an indispensable guide and reference.

*****

Contact Mike Bannan: mike@digitalrdm.com

Comments

Peter@interactive-blogger.com said…

Does this tell you how to set up the structure of the blog? I'm struggling with configuring the PHP sidebars etc at the moment to get my blog to look how i want it

12:00 PM

Tom Pick said…

Yes, the content on blog setup and sidebars is very good. Some third-party blogger templates are difficult to customize properly, but most should work with the instructions provided in Lee's book.

12:05 PM

seo services said…

This book looks interesting and worth buying for.

9:01 AM

All Time Greats

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte...

Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEM

Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the fastest-growing categories in all of advertising, because it is both measurable and logical: present your ads when people are searching for what you're selling. A well-crafted search marketing program can provide not only broad brand exposure at a very reasonable cost (with CPMs of $10 or less), but also high-ROI lead generation. As with any other type of advertising, however, a poorly-designed campaign will be a disappointing waste of money. In addition to best practices in search engine marketing , the following articles and blog posts were among the best of 2007 at providing helpful guidance for creating and managing effective search marketing programs. Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign by Search Engine Guide Blogger Jennifer Laycock explains how common mistakes such as "ego bidding," writing a single ad for all keywords, and directing all of your traffic to a single landing page can limit the res...

Marketing Automation: Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

This content has been moved to Marketing Automation: Like Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles del.icio.us tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles icerocket tags: b2b marketing lead nurturing marketing-automation software demand-generation software Steve Woods Eloqua hosted-email-services email-service-providers ESP Constant Contact VerticalResponse ExactTarget shorten sales cycles Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The 8 Layers of a B2B Web Marketing Plan

One way to think about designing a B2B technology web marketing plan is as a series of layers, like an onion. At the core is SEO—simply making your website "findable" through organic search to buyers who are looking for what you offer. Working out from the center are concentric layers of additional investment and sophistication. Small companies and start-ups with modest budgets will focus most of their efforts on the inner layers or rings, which are primarily designed for lead generation. As the company and its marketing budget grow, efforts can be expanded to the outer layers, which are aimed more at branding but support lead generation efforts. Ideally, a company eventually reaches the outer layer where pure branding activities (such as print advertising) help to maximize the effectiveness of lead generation programs (such as SEM) near the center of the circle. This diagram shows how different types of web marketing programs can be prioritized in order to maximize the retur...

Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2

This content has been moved to Best of 2008: Social Media Marketing on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis del.icio.us tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis icerocket tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foe...

Marketo Releases Marketo Lead Management 3.0

Marketing automation software vendor Marketo today announced the launch of its Marketo Lead Management 3.0 software suite. With more than 200 new features, the release is the most significant since the product's initial launch in early 2008. Promising deeper support for a "conversational model of marketing," the new release provides 75 user interface enhancements as well as new features including: More fine-grained control over segmentation, targeting, and triggering; "Progressive profiling" on forms (i.e. additional profile is requested as a prospect moves through an interactive process); Native integration with Salesforce.com ; Web visitor profiling; and Automated duplicate lead removal. Pricing starts at $1,500 per month and the company now has more than 150 midmarket and enterprise customers. Marketo competes with products such as Eloqua , Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz), and Manticore in the marketing automation / demand generation sp...

The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream? Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year. Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers. Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection Sandeep Krishnamurthy , Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile...

SEO Link Building of 2008

Unless you are optimizing only for some extremely niche keywords, off-page optimization—building links from other websites to yours—is a critical and significant factor for SEO success. The blog posts cited here, some of the best of 2008 on the topic of link building, provide guidance on how and where to obtain valuable external links. They also offer advice on ineffective tactics and "bad neighborhoods" to avoid. Local Search Ranking Presentation - SMX LoMo 2008 by Website Promotion Is Not Voodoo Will Scott , president of Search Influence, shares his presentation from the San Francisco for SMX Local Mobile event. His deck actually covers the organic search marketinging basics—keywords, content and links. But his section on "where to get links" is particularly helpful for anyone seeking to optimize local search results. 8 Directory Submission Red Flags by Small Business Search Marketing Matt McGee offers advice on what to avoid when obtaining links throu...

Search This Blog