Lexie Lane

The Blogger's Survival Guide is a tutorial providing detailed instructions for using the most popular blogging platforms, social media sites, and analytics sites. If you are ready to launch a blog soon and want a step-by-step instruction manual, this is it. If you are already blogging and want to get into more advanced blogging features now, this guide will be helpful. If you're not ready to take the plunge just yet, be advised that the step-by-step instructions may be out of date by the time you start blogging, because the websites described may have changed by then. Aside from those instructions, I could see coming back to this book in the future for the chapters on legal issues, monetization, or driving traffic. Overall this is a good book for those who want to put it to use right now.… (mere)

Lane & McNeer’s Blogger’s Survival Guide is a very useful and comprehensive handbook for all who consider setting up and maintaining a weblog. It is well organized, clearly explained and understandable, also to newbies in the field; it even contains an extensive index.
If anything negative needs to be said, it will be that the book is primary targeted at those who wish to make money with their blogs, thereby overlooking a considerable and growing group who doesn’t, such as educators or scholars who wish to freely share their thoughts and knowledge.… (mere)

Lexie Lane and Becky McNeer have written a guide to blogging that goes through the steps from initial creation of a blog, to building a following, to garnering ad revenue and sponsors. The novice can learn enough to get started, while even the experienced blogger is bound to learn a tip or two. There are many helpful blogging tools and programs referenced and commented on, and loads of tips scattered throughout.

The book appears to have originally been designed for a seminar, with the material divided up by days instead of chapters. It's an odd choice, and the organization of the material within the sections is sometimes puzzling. The guide stresses how important appearance is and yet they have fifty-plus pages with no internal section numbers. The guide has slight formatting differences to try and distinguish the different levels, but it was hard to keep the various levels straight and see the structure of the information. Numbered section headings and subheadings would have helped a lot.

The guide has many pages taken up with tutorials for stepping through popular online websites. However, stepping through signing up for a Google account, or performing operations on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or LinkedIn are repeating basic information that is already available on those websites. In addition, those sites periodically change their user interface to the point that some of the information is already outdated. Still, scanning through the steps might give a novice a sense of what is to come, as long as they aren't also the kind of novice that gets thrown if the information in a guide doesn't quite match what they see at the site.

The guide also spends some thirty pages on basic tutorials on HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript. You will only see these show up in the Table of Contents as "3 Common Languages Often Seen on Blog Designs." There are plenty of tutorials online for each of these. So while mentioning them would have been good, the tutorials might just send someone to an online tutorial they like.

The focus of the guide is clearly money-making. Whatever the section header title, the discussion often turns to money topics. Perhaps this is as it should be. I was interested in finding out what the flood of blogs was all about. I like writing, so I was curious if it was something for me. Based on this guide, it seems clear the focus is money. This guide contains reference and tutorial information to get started on developing your blog topic and brand, but the advice is focused on methods to get traffic to your blog and how best to make money from that when you do. The material could be more even and organized, but I think it could be the right book for someone interested in developing a blog and wanting an overview, some good links, and some tips on how to begin.… (mere)

Any book that purports to be a "How to xxxxx" guide is going to be a tough one for an author to get right.

If they assume some readers have absolutely zero knowledge of the subject then the temptation will be to start with a very basic level of instruction or explanation. But that risks frustrating readers who already know the basics. Progress too quickly beyond the basics in order to satisfy these more advanced readers, and it's the beginners who end up frustrated.

When the subject is one that's changing as quickly as blogging, the challenge gets even harder. For by the time you get into print, those social media sites you highlighted may no longer exist or may have changed their features or rules, thus making your carefully crafted tips somewhat redundant. A book like The Bloggers Survival Guide by Lexi Lane and Becky McNeer is consequently going to have a relatively short shelf life.

This book is subtitled Tips & Tricks for Parent Bloggers,Wordsmiths and Enthusiasts. Not only doesn't this exactly trip off the tongue, it also doesn't represent the contents very well. There is actually little in here which speaks to people who want to write blogs specifically about parenting or childcare so it's baffling why the authors elected for such a precise title.

What you get instead is a step by step guide for anyone who wants to set up a blog of any description. The early chapters deal with the basics like choosing a blog platform and a name, organising the content effectively and then progress onto the more advanced techniques of search engine optimisation, using social media to promote your blog and finally into the arena of how to turn your blog into a money-making venture.

The quality of the content is patchy however. You won't find much discussion on the thorny question of choosing the right topic area upon which to focus the blog, or how to generate quality articles/posts — these topics are dealt with very sketchily as if the authors assume you have already know how to do this. It didn't give me a lot of confidence to see in chapter one a comment to the effect that the authors wouldn't cover many of the aspects of setting up a blog using Wordpress because the Wordpress tutorials themselves were excellent. Rather an own goal I fear.
Fortunately they redeem this defect with some more substantive information and guidance later in the book, plenty of practical suggestions and good references to other sources of information. It does however have a US bent so the chapter on legal issues, while good, doesn't mention any European directives or blogging practices in countries where there are more restrictions on social media.
In short this isn't a perfect instruction manual by any means but if will certainly help people to get up and running and will also help more experienced people who want to learn how to make their blog sparkle.

Endnote

The Bloggers Survival Guide is published in paperback form by Wayman Publishing (2013). My copy was provided by the publishers via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.… (mere)