Today I wanted to share with you an awesome title I just finished reading: Technical Blogging - turn your expertise into a remarkable online presence by Antonio Cangiano.
Technical Blogging teaches you how to gain influence and earn money from your blog. It applies to any blog, but the examples are related to a programming blog, so ideal for me.
In 254 pages you get a lot of useful insight, with quite some technical depth. The author has quite some experience in the field. Some tricks I did learn already from a couple of years blogging. However, there was still a lot of advice I could pick up to start improving my blog.
However there are two things the author cannot provide and are thus assumed: you dedicate the necessary time and your are able to provide good content. If you have that in order, complementing it with this book can indeed make you a power blogger.
... and this book covers a lot!
The book covers the whole process from starting to maintaining a blog. From the analysis/ planning stage (part I) to building it plus providing remarkable content (part II), to promotion (part III), earning from your blog (part IV) and finally scaling it (part V). In all parts are a lot of useful gems to digest.
Some things I especially liked:
- The focus on a technical blog. This was exactly what I needed. But any blogger can benefit from this book.
- The general depth of the topics covered (e.g. the SEO aspects are well addressed, understanding traffic stats, writing strategies (posting schedules, how to find ideas), the different ways to make money from your blog, etc.)
- As said, the wide scope and many directly and indirectly related topics that are useful to know, some of them provided me with new insights: engaging readers, target the right social networks (for programmers hacker news, reddit and dzone) and the ways these are different, tactics for writing good content. Even productivity tips like the Pomodoro technique are explained.
- Clear examples, mostly drawn from the author's blog. In fact the author is very open sharing his visitor stats and affiliate earnings.
- A lot of links/ reference material.
Conclusion and what's next
I highly recommend Technical Blogging to anybody that maintains or wants to start a blog. I found it an inspiring read and it will serve as a reference as I keep improving my blog.
I also did a post on blogging myself: 10 crucial steps to become proficient at blogging.
If you want to extend this to building a business from your blog you might also want to check out ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.
