Recently, I read and reviewed ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Now, here’s another book about how to blog.
If that work is an introductory handbook to blogging as a potential home-based business — analogous to the way someone might raise chinchillas — The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging is more of a gospel of blogging, evangelizing the practice like a pseudo-religion with a lot of celebrity devotees, all ushering in a new, ecstatic world order.
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A small blogging Bible
Upon delivery from Amazon.com, this HuffPost book turned out to be an inch less tall than the standard, O’Reilly-sized IT handbook I was expecting. Authored unspecifically “by the editors of The Huffington Post”, the cozy text is accompanied by many sidebar articles from assorted HuffPost bloggers, such as Harry Shearer, Nora Ephron, Deepak Chopra, John Ridley, Gary Hart, and many others.
The overall thrust of the book is to extol blogging as the powerful, rich, and rapid new medium it is. Numerous examples are given of HuffPost bloggers being moved to write things on some particular topic or issue, with their resulting posts receiving quick and unexpected feedback and ultimately making some sort of difference. It’s inspiring stuff, and the book does a great job of conveying the spirit of blogging — the informal, responsive, interactive personality of the medium. There are helpful chapters on finding your voice, getting noticed, and creating and building community.
What you will not find here is in-depth technical advice on how to blog, website optimization strategy, or an articulated profit model. Blogging software and platforms are skimmed over in just a few short paragraphs. Google AdSense and Amazon Associates are also barely mentioned.
Make money blogging?
This complete guide doesn’t get into such details, but there has been a lot of controversy over The Huffington Post’s largely unpaid contributors and partially-paid staff.
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There should at least be a chapter on “Recruiting a couple thousand famous writers who don’t need money,” just to give this blogging Utopia some realistic skin and bones. (By the way, Alec Baldwin, Larry David, Lizz Winstead and Al Franken are all invited to guest-blog for free at MarkCz.com any time they like.)
As you would expect, almost all of the case anecdotes used to illustrate blogging principles here are drawn from The Huffington Post, so they reflect HuffPost’s politically liberal take on things. While a liberal quilting blogger could probably adapt these lessons easily to the quilting sphere, I imagine a conservative political blogger might frequently find this book irritating, despite its generally solid advice.
Best blogging by HuffPost
Additionally, Chapter 6 is devoted to “A brief history of Huffington Post and its impact.” Much more self-laudatory than instructional, the chapter quotes Arianna Huffington on everything from her daughters’ impending sexuality to counterfeit Italian cheese — brilliant witticisms to be sure, but perhaps better celebrated in her memoirs than a book on how to blog.
As if this weren’t enough, another 38 of the book’s 230 pages comprise an appendix of favorite Huffington Post content from the past — after previously reveling in the very ephemerality of blog posts (“a soap bubble, meant to last just a moment or two,” writes Nora Ephron). Plus, at the end of the main text, there’s a short “Glossary of blogging terms” which defines words such as “blog,” “blogger,” and “blogging.” I have no idea who would find this useful after reading the book.
Still worth reading
Taken as a whole, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging is a breezy, entertaining, and even inspiring read. It may not lay out a way to make a living from blogging, but it should motivate passive readers to more actively participate in the medium as writers — whether simply for self-expression or to achieve some sort of result.
Heck — while reading the book, I used its advice and my blog to settle a billing issue with Time Warner Cable. That alone saved me $30, which was twice the U.S. cover price.
Awesome and reading this was great perspective on blogging….I especially liked how you apparently gave it to Time Warner!