ProBlogger book - Hip or hype?
By Koka Sexton • Apr 19th, 2008 • Category: Lead StoryA couple weeks back I felt a disturbance in the force. Chris Garrett and ProBlogger announced that they have assembled a book together that has Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Sure that sounds great but is this really necessary? I am a bit split on my opinion and figured I would write them out and see what your take is.
“How to blog” wrapped in a box - Amazon Product Description
Blogging has become a popular and fascinating pastime for many, but more and more bloggers are finding it can also be an excellent source of direct or indirect income. Although the barriers to starting a blog are low, without expert guidance it is easy to get frustrated when success doesn’t match expectations. Written by the creator of the world’s #1 resource for making money with blogs, ProBlogger takes the reader from absolute beginner to earning money from or as a result of blogging. Through step by step practical lessons the reader will choose a blog topic, analyze the market, set up a blog, promote it and earn revenue.
Unlike other books that are big on potential and theory, ProBlogger provides results based on the authors own experience of what really works through practical, tried and tested advice. Inside readers will learn:
* How Bloggers Make Money
* Direct Income Earning vs. Indirect Income Earning methods
* Why Niches are Important
* Using 20 critical blogging tools
* 20 Ingredients for a successful blog post
* Optimizing advertising
* Which advertising platforms work best
* Expert analysis of Technocrat’s Top Blogs - why they work and so much more.
Being #1
This is, as far as I can tell the first release besides Lifehacker that went from virtual to physical in book form. Being some of the pioneers in the Make Money Online niche and social media space the authors Chris Garrett and Darren Rowse may have just hit the gold mine with this book.
Amazon is the largest online distribution sources for books and the attention this book is getting is amazing. The announcement post from Darren already has 108 comments in appreciation. Over at Chris’s blog he has gotten 8. After the announcements, other sites started spreading the word. The ProBlogger Book is currently at #2 on the Amazon Best Sellers list under Computers and Internet and Blogging. The fact that these two powers have converged into a book deal is almost mind blowing. But maybe I just need to get off their nuts.
Do we need a book on this subject?
This is not a get-rich-quick book, but rather a practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating a six-figure income.
A statement like this stands out. With so many MMO sites in the niche the mere search of make money online in a Goolge blog search pulls up 2,429,363 listings. There is a cesspool of websites out there that want nothing more for you to click on their ads for a quick buck. If you want to get rich quick you had better give up.
There are however an exponential set of opportunities to make money online. From affiliate programs to PPC there are so many I don’t even want to list them. I figure Darren and Chris took the time and made an entire chapter explaining all of the options. From the description of the book it really just looks like they grabbed a bunch of their favorite posts on the subject and compiled them into chapters. Isn’t that what their blog already is supposed to do? Problogger hosted an article guest written by Skellie that clearly spelled out this need. Skellie is another great voice in the blogosphere with a number of sites like Anywired that I follow.
A category list with 10 categories is a lot more usable than a list with 50 categories. Too many options creates overload which leads to deferral: a visitor will not engage with that element at all. Your list of 5 most popular posts will get clicked more than your list of 20, and so on. Simplified options make it easier for the visitor to decide where they want to place their attention. Too much choice will actually hurt your blog’s usability.
With so many free tips and tools available why spend $17.00 on a 240 page paperback book? Even as a beginning blogger part of the thrill was to find new and interesting sites online that could teach me how to be better at my craft? That’s how I found ProBlogger and Chris Garret to begin with.
What’s really in this book?
Did Chris and Darren wake up in the middle of the night in sync with some brilliant idea of how to transform the blogging for dollars market and call each other? I doubt it. Both are extremely talented writers and marketers and this has probably been in the works for several months. Other than blogging about how to blog they put together a guide to walk the people from idea to product and have it bound. This is really nothing new, people have been writing books for at least a few hundred years about how to do just about anything under the sun. Based on the descriptions provided and the explanation on ProBlogger’s and Chris’s respective sites, there really is nothing ground breaking being published. 240 pages of explaining what most people already know if they read either one of their sites and have a genuine interest. It’s really a simple process that could and has been driven into the dirt.
- Find a niche that your passionate about.
- Get a blog account and start developing content.
- Market your site and build a decent sized community.
- throw up some advertising and Voilà you are starting to make a few buck.
- Rinse and repeat as necessary.
The truth is that it all comes down to finding the perfect niche for YOU and putting in a lot of work to build it up. As the sites clearly states. This is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s going to take a year or more. Put your heart into anything and you will reap some rewards. The secret is not a secret, you just don’t want to hear it!
ProBlogger and Chris would not release a book unless these two felt that it was pristine. I sure hope they don’t let their fans down with some watered down fluff with a few great tips. Darren and Chris are extremely influential to thousands of fans around the world. They support us by providing knowledge and I support them by pre-ordering a book that could help me define my online life.
What do you think? Is the ProBlogger book a brilliant idea or just another attempt at making some money?
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thanks for your post and thanks for your purchase - I do appreciate your thoughts and support by buying it.
The reason we wrote this book (well one of them) is that we are constantly asked by people a stream of common questions. As a result we write about those topics again and again.
The problem is that I’ve written 4000 posts on ProBlogger and Chris has written many also and to find all of our latest thoughts on these common problems that bloggers face in the one place is difficult. Blog posts don’t naturally flow from one to another in a sequence that helps bloggers see how the different pieces of advice fit together.
The purpose of this book is to present a comprehensive list of tips, up to date for now, all in the one place, in a logical order, in a language that even a new blogger could understand.
Yes a lot of this information is out there already but we hope that having it collected together in this way will help bloggers in a way that finding it on line can’t. Of course we encourage people to learn on their own through experimenting also - but it’s sometimes good to have a resource to start with.
I sure wish I’d had something like this to give me a headstart when I started blogging!
Anyway - thanks for your thoughts, looking forward to hearing how you find it when you get your copy!
Darren’s last blog post..AdSense Secrets 4.0 Launches
I often see the benefit in having a hard copy even of ebooks I own. When it comes to a blog like Problogger, the added benefit of having the posts put in specific order is worth even if there is no new content.
Yes, I believe it is worth the money.
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Hello,
I’ve always been a loyal reader of problogger, so i think they really want to help their readers =) I never bought the book though lol
@Darren I am really excited for this book to arrive, I know it will be wonderful.
@Stephan as much as I am online, having a book IRL does make a huge difference and I would have paid more for the book.
@Lee Thanks for the comment and for being a new reader.
Well, like Darren said, most of the info in the book is already present in one form or the other on Problogger or Chrisg.com, but a compilation of the best tips, guides and general info is always welcomed, especially for the beginners. I don’t know what value the book will bring for more advanced bloggers, but I bought it nonetheless, because firstly I’m terribly curious how the first physical serious blogging book (?) in the world looks like and secondly, I just wanted to support Darren and his work on Problogger. After all I’ve been a reader for all these years and I never gave something significant back.
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