Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions) Review
So this is what Google offers? Like most of what it presents to a general audience, the cost is free. How good is it? Pretty good. All the basic abilities you could reasonably expect are there. Starting with a top-down template approach. Where you, the owner of a website that you want to have a blog in, can quickly choose between several popular candidate formats. Each having numerous customisable parameters. So it is trivial to define the name of your blog, and give it a short general description and, possibly, an accompanying image. This could be of yourself, for example. Or of your band, if the blog will be for the band.
I’m not lightly raising the previous example either. Google is in competition with other social networks. A major opponent is Myspace, which is a big music hangout. Yet if you are a band dissatisified with what Myspace lets you do, Google Blogger might be more flexible. Think about it, anyway.
Blogger also goes beyond just making the graphics. This being from Google, it has the means to hook up to data streams. Social bookmarking. If you are indeed serious about making a widely read blog, then pay very careful attention to these sections of the book. There are already millions of blogs on the Web. Most get very little traffic. With this in mind, Blogger has useful tools. That might let you share posts by email, in an attempt to pursue viral marketing.
There is also advice on how to position your blog so that search engines [and presumably Google in particular] might treat it favourably in organic rankings. Given that Blogger comes from Google, take heed.
At the most basic level, the book advises you to write as well as you can. Write articles that are original and interesting. Ultimately, this will be the biggest factor in attracting a wide audience. Keep in mind that Blogger [and every other blogging package] cannot help you with this. It provides a framework within which to write. But as always, in the end you are on your own.
Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions) Overview
In Detail
Blogger is a blog publishing system from Google with a friendly interface specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs.
It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features including RSS feeds, link-backs, photo slideshows, and integration with popular Google applications like Picasa. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.
If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will focus on transforming a typical blog into something fresh and professional that stands out from the crowd. It starts with an introduction to an example blog, discussing what it is lacking, and then adding all the features of Blogger to make it successful. This book will tell you how to transform a slow-paced typical business blog into an attractive and interactive profit-making blog with measurable results. It has a very user-friendly approach and shares tips, tricks, and resources to continue to grow your blog.
What you will learn from this book?
The book aims to be a “complete” guide to working with Blogger. The focus is on more advanced, professional uses. You will learn everything you need to know to extend your blog and grow beyond the basics of using Blogger. This book will cover the following:
- Customizing and creating templates to make your blog attractive
- Adding social bookmarks to your blog to promote your site
- Joining the blogosphere to drive traffic to your site
- Customizing your blog by using widgets effectively
- Customizing your blog’s RSS and Atom feed, so that the Blogger feeds are available to the users
- Managing ads and adding e-commerce features
- Monitoring viewers and ads using Google Analytics
- Managing and optimizing your blog for search engines
- Integrating your website with your blog
Approach
Written in a clear, easy-to-read style, the book takes you through the essential tasks required to create a feature-rich blog as quickly as possible. From initial setup to customizing modules, each task is explained in a clear, practical way using an example blog developed through the book. You’ll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools.
This book deals with using the current Blogger and third-party tools to optimize and create widgets for your blog. You’ll transform your blog using existing tools then take it further with more challenging approaches to customizing your blog. All the steps involved in each example are listed under the section called “Time for action”. Similarly, the results of that action are listed under the section called “What just happened”. This structure adds to the clear, simple, and focused approach of the book.
Who this book is written for?
The book is aimed at current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Blogger and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger. Blog owners who promote their own services, expertise, and products, and want to increase their blog’s success by pushing the limits of what Blogger can do will get the most out of this book.
The book doesn’t require any specific knowledge of Blogger or the related technologies: RSS, CSS, HTML, and XML. Everything you need to know to grow beyond the basics is covered in this book. The companion website to this book (bloggerbeefedup.blogspot.com) includes free resource images and content.
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