Jesse Smith’s Blog

Stephane Grenier has put together Blog Blazers, a book of interviews with bloggers. Ian Landsman, one of the bloggers featured in the book, had some free review copies to hand out, and offered them to any of his blog readers who agreed to post a review. I’ve been reading the blogs of both Steph and Ian for a couple of years now, so I was happy to volunteer.

General Content

The format of the book is quite simple. There are 40 chapters, each being an interview with a particular blogger. The interviews, with only a few small exceptions, use the same series of questions, suggesting that the interviews were done by email and not interactively. On one hand, I feel that by using this technique Steph missed some opportunities to further probe into some of the bloggers’ responses. On the other hand, by standardizing the list of questions, it becomes easier to compare each blogger’s advice and opinions. I’m not sure whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages; let’s just say that Steph chose a particular set of tradeoffs.

The group of 40 bloggers cover a range of different topics in their blogs, although the group is heavily stocked with bloggers who write about small business and entrepreneurship, in particular small software companies. This is not really any surprise, seeing that Steph runs a small software company himself, but it just goes to show how insular the blogging world can be. There may indeed be millions of blogs out there, but on any given topic, there are only a few big names. Prior to reading Blog Blazers, I was already a regular reader of 10 out of the 40 bloggers that Steph interviewed.

On that topic, I don’t really believe the oft-hyped statistic (trotted out again in the introduction of this book) that there are 70 million blogs in the world, with a new one created every second. I expect a great many of those “blogs” are just “spam blogs” that republish content from other sights in hopes of attracting traffic for their advertisements, and most of the rest are personal “what my cats ate for breakfast” blogs. The number of blogs worth reading in any given field is still an almost manageable number.

Lessons Learned

So what do we learn over the course of 40 interviews? The main conclusion that I drew was that every blogger is idiosyncratic, and the methods by which they found success are not guaranteed to work for anyone else. Several bloggers of more or less equal success offered advice that essentially flatly contradicted each other. Some say “write short posts more than once a day” and “don’t spend much time editing”. Others say “write long articles no more than once a week, and spend days revising them over multiple drafts”. Maybe I should write medium-length posts every 3 days!

This isn’t much different from any other business venture. You can read anecdotes and stories all day, every day, but in the end, you just have to experiment with different things until you find something that works for you. If there was an easy method that anybody could follow and be successful with, I suppose everybody would already be doing it! So in the end, I view this book as another interesting and thought-provoking set of business anecdotes more than as a compilation of actionable advice. I’m OK with that, although it leads me to the only real problem I had with this book.

Where It Falls Short

The back cover makes a lot of exciting promises. Steph asks what’s the difference between a successful blog and an unsuccessful one, and teases, “What if it were just a few relatively easy-to-do things?” He says that “transforming a blog from ‘crash-and-burn’ to blast-off isn’t rocket science!” He promises that “you’ll learn what the top blogs all have in common”.

And I don’t really feel that this book delivers on that promise. In the end, the book is a nice collection of interviews, but lacks any in-depth analysis to tie them all together. It’s left as an exercise to the reader. There’s an anemic one-page epilogue, but it’s basically just a pep talk to get out there and start (or improve your) blogging. Steph did a great job at getting all of these bloggers to respond to his interview questions and at assembling their answers into this book, but I wish he had contributed more of his own intellectual analysis to it and answered some of the questions he asked on the back cover blurb.

My Attempt at an Analysis

I’ll take a stab at it, because I do feel that there were some common themes. Here are some of the ideas that kept coming up in the interviews:

• Don’t try to imitate other bloggers; find your own personal voice.
• Headlines/titles are very important, both for SEO purposes and for luring in readers who only see the headline at first. Don’t write “clever” headlines that don’t make it clear what your post is about.
• Enough bloggers recommended reading ProBlogger.net that I subscribed to it (and I agree that it’s worth reading for bloggers aiming to build their readership).

And the most important concepts that just about every blogger emphasized:

• Write interesting original content; don’t just echo what other bloggers have written. This is where most blogs fail, because it’s hard to consistently create new content. And you say it has to be interesting, too? Oh, man!
• Perseverance is essential. A blog becomes successful and builds readership over many months or years. Expect to be able to count your regular visitors on one hand for quite a while. This is the other place where most bloggers fail; they get discouraged and lose interest in writing.

These concepts shouldn’t surprise anyone, really; it’s no different in any sort of business or artistic venture. Anything worthwhile involves the creation of something new and valuable to others, and perseverance to push through the times when you are discouraged and pessimistic.

Final Recommendation

So is Blog Blazers worth reading? Yes, I think so. I was already familiar with many of the bloggers interviewed, so it was interesting to read and compare their various views on blogging. Some of them had very thought-provoking things to say that have helped me consider how I should manage my relatively new blog. And I did get some useful tips and advice, and a few new feeds for my blog reader.

Would I recommend buying it? Probably, but I would recommend buying the ebook, which is at least $3 cheaper than the paperback, is searchable, and saves paper. It’s not the kind of book you’ll be flipping through as a reference after you’ve read it once. But I’m glad I read it, and if Ian hadn’t sent me this review copy, I would have bought the ebook and felt that I had received more than my money’s worth.