Get inspired to blog with Blog Blazers

I frequently recommend to clients that they should start a blog. Not to every client, mind you–blogs aren’t for everyone–but many companies should. Sometimes, I can help them, but there are times when, I admit, they just don’t seem to be able to start a blog, despite all I tell them. I’ve sometimes wondered what they’ve needed, but now I might have a resource for them that will help, a new book by Stephanie Grenier called Blog Blazers.

Stephanie takes a really simple idea–interviews with 40 top bloggers–and executes it very well. One of my favorite things about the book is that I didn’t know all of these top bloggers. In fact, I knew less than half of them. So besides getting all of these great tips about blogging, I also found several new voices that I follow now.
The great thing about this book is that the stories serve as examples. That’s why I’ll recommend it for my clients.
Sometimes I forget that people need more than instructions. They need role models. And they need those role models to unpack their thinking. They can’t just read Seth Godin’s blog and do what he does. But when Seth explains that most blogs are about the writer and not the reader, something can click for people struggling with “the secret” of blogging.
But you don’t have to be as famous as Seth Godin to provide good advice. I didn’t know Dharmesh Shaw before he was interviewed in this book (although I had heard of his company, HubSpot), but when he was so adamant about bloggers owning their own domain name instead of just grabbing a free blog on Blooger that it has to make an impression. He even offered to pay the first year domain costs of the first 1000 people to contact him–that’s someone who believes what he says.
Stephanie’s book is full of that kind of down-to-earth advice. Now I know that some people might read this book and say, “Well, these are all successful individuals with blogs, but I want to make a successful blog for my company.” Unfortunately, that misses the point. Your successful company blog will become successful only because of the individual (or team) that writes it.
If you’re the kind of person that needs examples to succeed, you could do a lot worse than emulating the 40 bloggers profiled in Stephanie’s book. Why not decide to read just one blogger story a day? Each one is only a few pages. Inside of two months, you’ll be far wiser about how to write your own blog.
I wager that if you start subscribing to blogs and commenting on blogs in the same two months that you slowly read Stephanie’s book, you’ll be far more ready to embark on your own blogging than you feel today. Again, blogging, like any other tactic, is not for everyone, but reading Blog Blazers will help you decide if it’s for you.