Publish & Prosper: Blogging for your Business

reviewed by Chris Marshall

What they say:

While personal blogs take up much of the blogosphere, blogs are quickly gaining popularity in business as an inexpensive and amazingly effective marketing tool. It’s time for a practical book about business blogging: this is the first book to demonstrate how businesses are blogging and how you can use blogging technology to converse with your customers to build your brand and sell your products.

Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.

DL Byron has just completed the development of Boeing's blogs. He is currently working on the next Blog Business Summit and rolling out a network of sponsored blogs.

Steve Broback is the co-founder of the Blog Business Summit and the i3forum conferences. Steve manages the editorial blogs rawformat.com and pixelupdate.com which are the center of Avondale Media's marketing strategy.

What I say:

I didn’t really get into blogging for a while either in terms of reading them or writing them. It was a bit like that with this book.

Now I am really into blogging; I subscribe and read far too many, try and write more than I should and am even providing some business consultancy on setting up and using blogs. So it accurate to say that I am a BIG fan of blogging, and the same can be said for this book.

I have one criticism of the book that I will get out of the way first. For a book that is targeted at the business community it spends far too much time talking about the public community. Now this isn’t a problem in itself as every page of the book is worth reading, but it is a little confusing at times. You have the feeling of been swept pleasantly down one route and then suddenly you are jerked back into the business community side of things. I would imagine that for most traditional businesses this general background will be very welcome, but for more modern businesses it may be a little simplistic.

As far as the structure goes the book consists of nine well-structured chapters:

• Chapter 1: Meet the Blogs, which provides a good introduction to the world of blogs and blogging.
• Chapter 2: Determining Your Focus, which talks about marketing, PR, customers and measurement.
• Chapter 3: How Much Blog – and How Often?, some good solid background information on blogs.
• Chapter 4: Designing for Readers, the fundamentals of design, RSS, comments etc.
• Chapter 5: Tools and Implementation, the mechanics of blogging.
• Chapter 6: Writing Your Blog, how to approach creating your posts.
• Chapter 7: Launching Your Blog and Getting Noticed, as it says!
• Chapter 8: Monitoring and Managing Your Blog, watching traffic, discovering trends and interaction.
• Chapter 9: Beyond Blogging, a quick look at the future of wiki’s, moblogging, audio and video.

Things that I liked specifically? The way that it put into context the stuff that I already knew, with the history that I had missed, along with the future direction of blogging. Unless you are “into” the technology the chances are that you will “go along” with the flow when it comes to setting up your blogs and this book does a great job of explaining these things.

Structurally the book is laid out really well with sections for Tips, Notes, key point “blocks” and graphics.

I would hazard a guess that many people will think that blogging is for geeks, fanatics and perverts, and of course it is. However, this book excellently demonstrates that blogging is in fact suitable for everyone, and goes a long way to providing the tools, techniques and confidence required to start blogging.

It is definitely worth a read.

In summary: I would say that this is a “must read” for any business or individual thinking of setting up a blog, or for an intermediate blogger looking to take their blog to the next level. Indeed I think experienced bloggers would learn (or remember) a thing or two by reading it.