I’ve finished and I’m amazed.

Firstly I think Joel Comm has totally missed his calling and should just concentrate on writing.  He has a real gift and this book is an excellent story, intermingling facts with just enough story to create a rich text.

There is so much information jam packed within the stories of how famous internet marketers like John Reese, Rich Schefren, Rosalind Gardiner, Yanik Silver, Jay Abrahams and hundreds more, all got started and what they are most remembered for.

All of the marketer’s personal stories are overlayed upon the history of how the internet even came to be and what it actually began as and what it has evolved into, to date.

To date being the operative phrase and conclusion of the book as Joel Comm tries to look into the future to see where the next big thing will be.

He finishes off by profiling a story of an Iranian girl, Ladan Lashkari, borrowed from Eric Holmlund’s blog. The cliff note is she doesn’t have one advantage that we do but is still managing to earn $US6,300 a month.

The story from all of these marketers is that they laser focused on one thing or one niche or one topic that they knew and took it from there.  What they learned from their first experiences they took to their second and so on.

So even though what I know is not savory, I also know there’s a huge and growing market for it so I’m taking all the tips I learned and going forward with it.

History is important.  To know where something has come from, you can judge where it may lead.  Joel Comm has given an excellent, and relatively concise history of who, what, when and where and wrapped it in entertaining ditties about the personal struggles of the big guys.

Fantastic and highly recommended read for anyone, but EVERYONE who is even THINKING of starting an online business.

Joel, can we please have more books?  You are a fantastic writer. Well done mate.

Kath

ProBlogging by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net and Chris Garret of b5media.com join forces to give us newbies and hopefuls a guide to making money by blogging.

There are so many of these at the moment both in blogs and books, it’s really hard who to believe.

However I tend to believe these guys for two reasons.

Firstly, take a look at their sites and rankings – the proof is all there.

Secondly, they are brutally honest about how they did NOT succeed for ages online and then how they began to succeed.  It’s a long process. Something that is not often cited in blogging and blogging literature elsewhere.

Half way through there is not much actually new that they have added here.  They talk about niche blogging or demographic blogging as if that hasn’t already been done to death – except there is a catch in this book.  Exercises.  They give a summary of what you should have ‘got’ so far and then finish with some exercises to prove their point about what they’re saying about niche blogging.

There is a whole chapter on blog platforms which I’ll be honest I skimmed through but it had the obligatory wordpress versus blogger scenario.

At chapter four where I’ll leave this review we are back at writing and content which is the universal theme so far about actually making money out of blogging.  Reminds me of another webmaster I’ll talk about later, who has been saying the same thing for nearly 10 years now.  Content is king.  And even though the new bloggers on the block may be using different interfaces and platforms to deliver it, content is still the winner.  If you build it they might come.  If you write well enough about it, they’ll definitely be there – those who are interested anyway.

Get your copy here: Problogger

I’ll finish the rest of the book by tomorrow and give the rest of the review.