Blogging for Beginners by Brian Wood: A Book Review

Should you start a blog? Is it still possible to make money from your blog? If you’ve considered starting a blog, and have decided now is the best time to make the leap, a good place to start is Blogging for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide to Make a Living from Blogging in One Hour a Day by Brian Wood

Setting Up and Establishing Your Blog

The first five chapters of this book contain exactly the information a brand-new blogger needs. Wood explains how to set up a blog and how to choose a niche. He goes over the various hosting options as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each. He also explains more technical terms that newbies probably won’t know like slugs.

Creating Content Advice

The next two chapters are about drawing readers to your site and keeping them there with useful content. As Woods says, to make money, your blog will have to fall into one of two categories, “Cool and funny or useful and informative.”

Within these two chapters, Woods explains how to find the places where your potential audience hangs out and how to attract them to your blog. He also gives a mini writing lesson explaining how to write a catchy title to draw readers in as well as how to keep them on the page, reading your entire post. (Ironically, many people will likely be drawn to his book because he has a catchy title including, “in one hour a day”, but very little is said about that in the book. The book is basically a blogging book for beginners with no mention of the time you will need to spend per day.)

More Advanced Topics

The last few chapters of the book cover more advanced topics such as using lead magnets and creating your own digital products. While these two topics are covered adequately for beginners, someone who wants to learn how to create these step-by-step would likely have to consult more in-depth sources.

Woods also covers affiliate marketing. While, as is to be expected from the book title, this is basic information, there are some good details here that beginners need to be aware of. For instance, don’t write a blog post just to promote the affiliate program you’re trying to profit from. Readers will see right through that and quit reading your blog.

Drawbacks of Blogging for Beginners

This book is written in a formal way, but at times, it is choppy and reads like a nonnative speaker wrote it. For example, “The best way of doing content promotion is by starting getting emails from your clients for the blog newsletters.” Fortunately, most of the book is not written this way, but the awkward sentence style did come up enough to interfere with my reading enjoyment.

Final Thoughts

If you’d like to start a blog but you’re overwhelmed by the process, this book is a good place to start. You’ll likely learn the basics, but you do have to be tolerant of the sometimes choppy writing style. (This book is available through the Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Start your free 30-day trial to read for free.)