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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

One of the best introductory books on blogging available - 2007-02-02
Reviewer Rating:
DL Byron and Steve Broback have really done an excellent job in writing this very thorough primer on blogging for business. The book, actually, is more than a mere primer: its breadth is surprising. They've managed to cover virtually every aspect of business blogging in a mere 180 pages. Quite an accomplishment and one the authors can certainly take pride in.

The approach is linear, beginning with an explanation of what a blog is, determining the focus of your business blog, the varieties of blog, design, tools for blogging, writing the blog, getting noticed, monitoring and managing and ending chapter on syndication and other fine points they refer to as "beyond blogging".

What is impressive is how much solid information the authors manage to convey without overwhelming the reader. The writing style is comfortable and spare. They avoid technical language and do a good job of explaining each point.

Overall this is one of the best books on blogging I've seen. It is practical, not theoretical and the authors left dogma and cant at the door. They are clear that blogs are not miraculous but can certainly help a company advance toward its goals.

Well done and a worthwhile read that will serve as a quick reference after you've read it.

Jerry

Very informative book - 2007-03-19
Reviewer Rating:
I have already been blogging, but this book helped me focus my efforts in a way that may help my business. Lots of great insightful info, and common sense explanations in this book. I found it very helpful and easy to read.

Great read for any level of blogging - 2008-07-28
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great handbook for starting up a blog (corporate or private for that matter). There is a lot of great info backed into this little book. I would highly recommend getting it for your team if you are starting a blog that requires a lot of support and buy-in. Nice work Byron & Steve.

BTW: If you ever get a chance to hear them speak on the topic, take it.

Great practical guide for blogging - 2009-08-08
Reviewer Rating:
I will readily admit that I am not the most computer savy person in the world. But, living in the world we live in, you simply have to learn how to use computers and the opportunities that technology provides. Blogging is a new trick this old dog had to learn.

If I learn one good idea from a book, I generally feel that I got my money's worth from the book. I have a page long list of ideas that I got from this book that will in time be incorporated into the blog for my business web site.

Not only do the authors address how to use a blog, they provide lots of ideas on how to write your blog in such a manner that visitors will come back to read your blog again and again. To me, this was the most valuable information in the book.

Regardless of whether your blog is for your business or it is simply a means for family and friends to keep track of what you are doing and stay in touch, you want your blog to bring people back to keep up with the content. Ideas on how to write you blog to do this alone make this book worth the price of purchase.

The book is readable, easy to find specific information and is logically organized. Non-fiction books that are not easy to use as a refernce book later are a source of information are irritating to me. Part of what I want from a book of this nature is the ability to use it with ease in the future to answer questions I did not have at the time I read the book or how to problem solve something now that I have come across the problem. This book's format is designed to do just that.

Best of all to me was the writing style of the authors helped someone like me, with very limited knowledge of blogging, to understand what this new concept is and to understand the language and jargon of blogging without treating me like an idiot, yet the text was not, to me at least, oversimplified. In other words, a book writen both for those new to blogging and those already familiar to the technology.

Review by Kevin Sivils, author of Self-publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace: A Resource Guide for the Author Considering Self-Publishing.

An excellent primer for businesses looking to create a web presence - 2009-02-23
Reviewer Rating:
Publish & Prosper's focus is the business looking to improve their public relations and marketing through blogging. The book is concise and well written, and I read it in less than a day.

The book discusses the popularity of blogs to readers and search engines, issues important to large businesses such as employee involvement and liability, start-up costs and software, and determining your focus. Also covered are formatting concerns, conversational style, dealing with comments and customer interaction, syndication, monitoring traffic, and other basic blogging issues.

If you're new to blogging, or if you're a business looking to develop a web presence, I recommend Publish & Prosper as an excellent primer to the world of blogging for business success.

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