After ten years of writing two (and sometimes, three) blogs,
it’s been a long-time goal of mine to learn more about the technical side of
blogging and how to earn some money from my blogging passions. As a freelance
writer with limited time and energy, it’s tough to justify the hours I spend
writing posts for my blogs…for free! I recently finished reading Blog, Inc: Blogging for Passion, Profit,
and to Create Community by Joy Deangdeelert Cho, and while I already knew
the basics, this comprehensive guide to blogging gave me some new ideas on how
to improve my blogs and perhaps earn a little money from them to help support
their continued existence.
Blog, Inc. covers
just about everything you need to know to write a blog. The first chapters
cover start-up, with topics including types of blogs, domain names, hosting,
and much more. Cho also covers some less obvious topics, like blogging
etiquette, writing a bio, and setting up a workspace. Once she’s described the
basics and how to get started, she goes on to discuss the business aspects of
blogging, like protecting your work, keeping track of financial records and
taxes, and all of the ins and outs of placing ads on your blog. She even
explains how to take things one step further, with advice on blogging
full-time, working with a partner, getting published, and more.
The layout and design of Cho’s book makes it very easy to
read, browse through, and digest. She is, after all, a graphic designer
herself, and it is clear she has applied some of her own lessons on writing a
blog to her book, with short, digestible sections and eye-catching fonts and
graphics. The information in her book is interspersed with examples of
successful bloggers. Each blogger profile includes an overview and a Q&A
about how the blogger got started, where they get their ideas, and other
aspects of their blogging success.
The first third of the book was mostly stuff I already knew
or had figured out, since I have been blogging for ten years, but I think these
sections on the basics would be very helpful to beginners. I tabbed plenty of
pages in the rest of the book, on social networking, financial stuff, copyright
protection, and analytics. The part I was most interested in – monetizing a
blog – was informative for me, though I had hoped to find some blogging
professional secrets and was a bit disappointed to learn that the main way to
earn money from your blog is simply ads. I have avoided these so far, not
wanting to “bother” my readers or overload my blog. Also, one of my blogs is
for people with serious chronic illness (many of whom are financially
destitute), and I don’t want any advertisers preying on them or selling them
things they don’t need.
The anti-ad attitude is my own problem, and I am considering
ways to work around my misgivings (please let me know in the Comments how you
manage this!), but Cho’s book at least gave me more information on the how-to
and the possibilities. Overall, although I got a lot of information from her
book that I hope to refer to again, I did feel that I wasn’t really her target
audience. I write a book blog and a chronic illness blog, and her example
bloggers were all in more visually prominent fields: design, fashion,
“lifestyle” blogs, and food writing. Since Cho is a graphic designer herself
and her own blog has that focus on the visual, some of her advice seemed
irrelevant for someone writing about books and illness. Though she did mention
something called Multiple Blogging Disorder, which I just might have!
If you are considering starting up a new blog or are new to
blogging and plan to focus on a very visual topic, then Cho’s book is a
perfect, indispensible guide. If, like me, your blog is less visual and/or you
are an old hat at blogging, then this book is less focused exactly on your
needs…but there is still a lot to be learned from certain sections. Cho is a
very successful blogger herself, who has turned blogging into a full-time job,
picked up clients because of her blog, launched her own product lines related
to her blog, and (obviously) published books (there are more) from her blog
content and blogging experience. She is definitely a blogging expert, and you
can learn a lot from this easy-to-read, pleasingly designed book.
179 pages, Chronicle Books
