It’s a case of ‘Have Kindle, will read.‘ And with my three months of Kindle Unlimited membership, I’ve been reading a few books about blogging. Will these turn the fortunes of One Man Many Plans around in a day and bring in the millions of eyeballs that every blogger covets? Er, the jury is still out on that one. But if you’re looking for books about blogging, here’s some of my thoughts from what I’ve found so far from someone who blogged and then blogged some more..
‘I’m going to start a blog, quit my job and make a fortune.’ If I had a fractional share in Tesla stock every time I read that, well that’d be far more revenue than this site ever makes. And I’d probably score a free Tesla to boot too in the process. (Red one please Mr Musk if you’re reading this.)
But apparently there are people who have done this in the blog sphere and similar scenarios in YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitch, and every other fame content creation service known to man (yes Onlyfans would certainly fit that bill too).
The trouble is for every success story, there’s millions if not tens of millions of people looking on and thinking well that can’t be that hard can it? Trying it on for size and hitting a wall of frustrations in record time. The success stories will tell you it’s incredibly hard work and even then success is limited to the fortunate.
The fortune side? Not even as my kids will tell me. Cards on the table, I have made a few hundred dollars out of this blogging malarkey. While that sounds okay, it’s been spaced over a decade. And when you look at it from that perspective, it’s not really lifestyle changing money exactly is it?
Still, if you’re looking to create a new blog or fine tune what you already have, I really don’t want to come across as someone trying to dissuade you. In fact if you write with passion, for the love of everything please start that blog. Because with everything including the kitchen sink being loaded with AI now, I don’t want the internet to become a bastion of artificial intelligence that can write but without warmth, creativity or experience. Human stuff written by humans please, I really don’t want Skynet telling me about it’s made up holiday.
And if you don’t know where to start, thankfully there’s a wealth of information out there and plenty of books about blogging to dive into. Here’s a handful I checked out on Kelvin the Kindle over the last few days, which netted me a bit of everything good and bad.
A ever so quick note: These books about blogging are available on Kindle Unlimited but also for sale through Amazon. The title links to each book are affiliate links, so if you click on them any buy anything from the site, Amazon might throw me a few cents in thanks. Those cents might by some US stocks, I still haven’t decided yet.
Books about blogging: The Sassy Way to Starting a Successful Blog when you have NO CLUE!
‘7 steps to WordPress bliss (Beginner Internet Marketing Sales book 1’
Alarming I know, but I am not sassy in the slightest and was completely unaware of the Sassy book series which includes books about blogging, writing a bestseller, travelling for free somehow and uncluttering your life. And so with my Sass stat being a complete zero, I figured this one could go either way – still, a reviews a review and I did pick up a couple of useful things in this one.
It does what it says on the tin (no wait, I meant cover) – it’s building a website blog from the ground up including getting to grips with WordPress, ideal plugins to using, choosing a theme etc. As one reviewer pointed out it’s information you could find though various free online tutorials if you needed too but it’s all summarised in this handy easy to read and fairly quick book, although this is just literally about the setup side and getting the mechanics right – the content creation part and ideas are in other books. So if you’ve never built a blog from the ground up, this would be a good place to start.
One little niggle though? It’s riddled with links. Some are bonus resources to help you with the setup, others ads to her other work (which I do too, back matter and other works are very important) but then there’s an offer on her blogging boot camp course, a masterclass, a cheat sheet, Instagram domination and so on. I finished the book and hit what felt like a long infomercial at the end and I can’t stand those things on my TV screen let alone in a book. And these links would be great if you’re reading them and pressing on them through a mobile or pc but on a kindle, yeah, things chug along like a wounded steam train running low on coal.
Maybe I’m just not sassy enough to appreciate all these amazing offers?
Books about blogging: Blogging
‘Getting to $2,000 a month in 90 days.’
Call me a cynic but I’ve never bought into anything that promises something amazing in a limited time frame, not even those spam ads that promise to double the size of my manhood with one pill over fourteen days.
I also need to point out that this book was not created for blogs that are all over the shop content wise (which would sum up this place just perfectly – a bit of this and a bit of that.)
However if your sole intention is to make money through blogging about one particular niche and it happens to be a popular one, well this would certainly worth a read. Just be aware that it’s a lot of work (the making money bit I mean , not reading through this book) and you’ll certainly have your hands, computer and internet super busy over those three months, so I hope you have some time on your hands (Isaac recommends at least two hours a day, more if you’re not the fastest blogger on the block).
If however you’re just writing for the love of it, blogging to share your journey or covering a tonne of topics from A to Z weekly then there’s not much in this one that will change what you do and create on a day to day basis.
Books about blogging: Blogging for Writers
‘How you can make money blogging as a writer and never be starving again.’
Proof in the pudding (er…printing) that not all books about blogging are created equal. Blogging for Writers has a captivating blurb explaining that you’re about to read things like ‘The 6 things your blog must have to keep visitors coming back‘ and ‘The one type of blog post that has been proven to attract more links, likes, and shares‘ but then takes a sharp left and drives down the nearest hill at record speed.
Kicking off with an ad looking for beginning bloggers (complete with a happy looking guy holding a wad of cash – interesting considering most blog payments would be digital), the first thing you’ll notice is the length of the book or rather the supreme lack of it. No seriously, my Kindle tells me it’s 20 pages long and you’ll hit the back end of it in less than five minutes. And the reason for that is that it reads like someone quickly jotted some notes down in blogging class, slapped a cover on it and put it up for sale that afternoon to be done with it.
No seriously – it’s not a book, it’s notes such as ‘Longer blog posts have been proven to attract more links, likes and shares’ and ‘Don’t stop writing until you are totally finished.’ Imagine if you opened up a fortune cookie and it had a couple of lines of blogging advice inside and you’re on the right feel for this one.
I pity anyone that paid $2.99 for blogging advice on this one because they wouldn’t get more than a sentence or two on various topics (most bloggers could pretty much guess most of them) and zero formatting. No titles, table of contents, chapters, examples, anything. I’d almost suspect an early version of ChatGPT spewed up some random blog hints here and it was a copy and paste job but I don’t think it was up and running back in 2016.
You can have your notes back on this one, it’s a not for me and Catladies wasn’t amused either.
So that’s a start, anyone else got any more books on blogging they recommend (or suggest to avoid?) Let me know!