Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time

Summary

The authors provide practical techniques to create, manage and promote successful business blogs. Tenacity, focus on true passions, flexibility, consistency and courage are described at the beginning of the book as some of the common traits of successful bloggers.

This books explains how blogging is a special kind of writing that needs to be differentiated from other types of writing. The authors highlight that everybody can blog, not only elite marketing people. This concept is even in the book title. Five useful skills that bloggers need are:

1. Dreaming
2. Storytelling
3. Persuading
4. Teaching
5. Curation

One chapter is devoted to explain each of those skills as part of the art of blogging successfully. For the process of discovering personal blogging skills, the book provides some skills quiz forms. This means that bloggers can have a preference for one of the five kinds of writing listed above and it is necessary to adopt a preferred specific type of writing to focus on it and have that specialization where the blogger feels comfortable and strong.

Some of the business benefits of blogging described by the authors are:

• Brand awareness
• Direct sales
• Indirect sales
• Sales support
• Research and development
• Public relations
• Crisis management
• Search engine traffic

Despite the fact that as shown in the list above, the authors promote the powerful benefits of blogging, they mention that a common problem is to set unrealistic expectations. In other words, the benefits are real but seeing the positive results may take months of patience and consistent work sharing the right content.

One of the chapters follows an FAQ format where some of the most common questions about business blogging are answered in approximately three to five paragraphs each. The questions are:

• Who "owns" the blog?
• How do I measure the success of my blog?
• How do I develop a content plan?
• How often should we blog?
• Do I write myself or outsource?
• We're already busy-how do we find the time to blog?
• What happens if we get negative comments?

The book explains that it is easy to overcomplicate blogging and that it is important to simplify processes and be pragmatic for example by using popular blog software such as WordPress if building a blogging tool from scratch would become a barrier that would prevent a company from starting to blog.

For attracting readers, the authors share the following practical easy ways to do it:

1. Give away your best
2. Add your blog to current marketing efforts
3. Contribute to other publications
4. Get active on your reader's social channels
5. Use savvy, simple SEO
6. Host guest bloggers
7. Join and sponsor conversations (Twitter chats and forums)
8. Reward your readers

Different ways to monetize a blog are explained in one of the chapters, showing a number of alternatives to "make a blog pay". The book also includes "a troubleshooting chapter" called "Rocks in the Road", where realistic scenarios are presented about situations and how to react when blogging is not working as planned or when different problems related to blogging arise.

Finally, the authors share some habits that are fundamental to make personal blogs successful. This book is filled with practical advice to become a successul blogger.