Title: The Blogger Trailmap: How to Take Your Blog to the Next Level in Easy Steps

Author: Chivi Frost

Genre: Non-fiction

Book link: Amazon

This short book is designed to guide a person along their blogging journey. It provides a professional outlook on blogs without discouraging a personal, creative touch or demanding one approach as “the way” of blogging.

The book meshes with a variety of free templates and guides available through Zavesti, an online marketing consultant team with over twenty years of experience, but it doesn’t read like promotional material. It’s a book in its own right, with illustrations that can be adapted to create helpful lists, charts, and guidelines for forging ahead.

Mixing personal stories of other bloggers’ challenges and successes with advice, this book is readable and practical, and most bloggers will likely find an unused bit of advice in the book—a reminder of something one could do to further their goals or an altogether new idea. Spanning such topics as how to monetize a blog and the seven rules of blogging, the book provides a broad range of encouragement and help for those eager to learn more and refine the process.

The book discusses search engine optimization, sales funnels, and email harvesting while offering a resource to help a person evaluate their online goals, presence, and plan. The wording is straightforward and easy to follow, though it could use further editing polish in places.

The book’s organization makes this a valuable resource, as headings and a table of contents allow the reader to find the topic of interest and jump around, and once the book gets going, it provides a steady stream of encouragement and simple steps. It’s not written as any kind of a “become a rich blogger overnight” formula, but rather offers the daily and weekly tasks necessary to achieve one’s goals in a steady way.

The illustrations are whimsical yet clear, and the book encourages bloggers to balance creativity with observation of what others are doing in their field, to follow one’s passion but to harness “tried and true” methods like copywriting, planning ahead, and learning from others.

Though seemingly written for a beginning blogger, this book seems to sidestep the task of explaining why a person might want a blog, why search engine optimization matters, and other, very basic elements to the blogging world. Similarly, the book doesn’t discuss how one might go about getting things like the blog audits and content audits it recommends as part of the blogging action plan.

The book isn’t designed to explain how to blog or vlog on a technical level. There is no discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of various platforms, and the vlogging side doesn’t discuss a great deal about lighting, video angles, or camera quality.

Direct and encouraging, this book will appeal to those seeking a straightforward resource about basic blogging techniques and tools. It provides concrete advice and guidance for anyone who has a blog, vlog, or other online platforms and is looking to grow it, either to reach more people, make more money, or otherwise become a clearer platform for their message.

This Editorial Review was written by the Book Review Directory staff. To receive a similarly honest, professional review for one of your own books, click here.