Bergman’s Guide for Bloggers

Posted by scoop on July 20th, 2009 in Blog basics, Professional Blogging, Tips |

If you are looking for a pretty comprehensive guide to professional blogging an excellent resource would be Michael Bergman’s “Comprehensive Guide to a Professional Blog Site: A WordPress Example”. The guide, as the title suggests covers quite a number of topics from hosting to commenting and using WYSIWYG editors to various blogging best practices.

The 80 page guidebook, which is available for viewing and downloading (free of charge!), may have been written in 2005 but the content is still really relevant to today’s blogger, both aspiring to go pro and otherwise. According to Bergman the book “addresses about 100 individual “how to” blogging topics and lessons, all geared to the content-focused and not occasional blogger. More than 140 citations, 80 of which are unique, are provided to other experts with guidance for all of us.” Topics he singles out to in his introduction for its usefulness include:

*How to choose blogging software and add-on tools
*Taking control of the blogging process by hosting your own site
*Getting your blog to display and perform right
*Effective techniques for converting existing documents to your blog site HTML
*Being efficient in posting, organizing and work-flowing to allow your diarist activities to flow naturally and productively
*Keeping the blog site pump primed with fresh and relevant content.

Note though that because of the length and the depth of the discussions do not expect to be able to absorb everything all in one sitting. And remember, though reading will help you learn a lot, experience is still the best teacher. So make sure you apply what you learn on your blog.