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Book: "Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence"

Like the book in my previous review, I bought "Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence", by Antonio Cangiano, during a winter e-book sale. Unlike the book in my previous review, I enjoyed this one.

While I've been blogging for over a decade, its never been a professional thing--I tend to write posts that are mostly reminders to my future self. I've thought about taking blogging more seriously (and have started, and abandoned a few that didn't work out) but this book gave me new focus and motivation.

Technical Blogging is organized in five main sections:

  • Planning (i.e., defining your topic and audience, setting goals, etc.)
  • Building (which covers WordPress customizations and content strategies)
  • Promoting (i.e., marketing and analytics)
  • Benefiting from your blog (i.e., monetization and other perks)
  • Scaling (i.e., increasing your reach, hiring writers, etc.)

Through each section, Cangiano's style is to offer very specific steps for each topic, along with an open-book view of his blogs' traffic and revenue numbers. It's opinionated and reads like a blogging consultant telling you want to do. That style doesn't always work for me, but in this case, I appreciated the frankness.