Blog Blazers – 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets

Yesterday I received a copy of Stephane Grenier’s new blogging book Blog Blazers, or to give the book it’s full title, Blog Blazers : 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets to Creating a High-Profile, High Traffic, and High-Profit Blog! .

In the book Stephane interviews 40 of the most influential bloggers on the web. It’s a very simple concept but as you know, sometimes those are the ones which work the best. Stephane first started developing this book about a year and a half ago and you can see the general outline for the book in his post ‘Marketing And Sales For Small Online Businesses‘.

Before I talk more about the book, I though it would be good to give you all a little information about the books author

About the Author

Stephane Grenier has been working online for several years. In 2003 he established his flasgship company LandLord Max, which sells Property Management Software to real estate agents.

In June 2005 Stephane started blogging about himself and his online successes and failures on his blog Follow Steph. This blog has now become the main source of marketing and advertising for LandLord Max and gets over 500,000 unique visitors per year.

Blog Blazers – 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets

After a quick summary about blogging and why Stephane wrote this book, the book dives right into the interviews. The 40 interviews are packed into 206 pages with each interview being around 4-6 pages long, which I think is a good length as no interview seems to drag on too long.

Because each interview is only 4-6 pages in length, the book has a sort of magazine feel to it i.e. you don’t have to concentrate really hard when reading or sit and take notes. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of great information in this book, far from it, however because each interview is just a few pages long and because the interviews have so many questions in them, the information is just so much easier to digest.

Here is a list of all the bloggers who are interviewed in this book. I’m sure you will recognise some of the names

• Aaron Wall from SEO Book
• Ades Tynyshev from Ades Blog
• Al Carlton from Coolest-Gadgets.com
• Alex Papadimoulis of Worse Than Failure
• Andy Brice from Success Software
• Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends
• Asha Dornfest from Parent Hacks
• Ben Casnocha from My Startup Life
• Ben Yoskovitz from Instigator Blog
• Bob Walsh from 47 Hats
• Dan Lyons from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
• Dane Carlson from Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog
• David Armano from Logic+Emotion
• David Seah
• Derek Semmler
• Dharmesh Shah from On Startups
• Eric Sink
• Ian Landsman of Userscape
• James and Alex Turnbull from Google Sightseeing
• JD from Get Rich Slowly
• Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror
• Jeff Clavier from Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
• Jennette Fulda from Half of Me
• Jenny from 101 Reasons I Hate Being Fat!
• Jessamyn West from Librarian.net
• Joel Cheesman from Cheezhead
• Jonathan Snook
• Manolo from Manolo’s Shoe Blog
• Neil Patel from Quick Sprout
• Pamela Slim from Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Patrick McKenzie from Micro ISV on a Shoestring
• Penelope Trunk from Brazen Careerist
• Ramit Sethi from I will Teach You to be Rich
• Rob Walling from Software By Rob
• Rohit Bhargava from Influential Marketing Blog
• Seth Godin
• Stephane Grenier from Follow Steph (the author himself!)
• Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion
• Trent Hamm from The Simple Dollar
• Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey

Each blogger was asked a range of questions rancing from the basic ‘Which five blogs do you regularly Read?’ to the more taxing ‘What is your best monetization method?’. The answers were very interesting and highlights how different some high profile bloggers think.

For example, when asked about which blogs they read some bloggers preferred smaller more personal blogs, others preferred larger more mainstream blogs which broke news whilst others confessed to not even reading blogs on a regular basis.

There are hundreds of blogs referenced in the book, you will be familar with many of them but there are lots you won’t (I’ve added a few to my newsfeed already!).

Summary

Retailing at 16.95 US Dollars, Blog Blazers is a thoroughly enjoyable book which you will find hard to put down. It gives a great insight into how some of the most successful bloggers on the internet think and what they believe is most important when developing and marketing a blog.

If you are looking for some inspiration for your blog then you can do much worse than pick up a copy of Blog Blazers. Recommended

Link : Blog Blazers

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on November 19th, 2008 and filed under Reviews
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