Book Review of Go From Blog to Brand in 30 Days by Cailin Koy

This is a must read for anyone who either wants to start a blog or who has one and who wants to make a real go of it. Here is your step-by-step guide to getting your blog branded, well-known, and possibly even making you money. Koy defines all of the relevant key terms and explains each step fully. As a beginning blogger, I followed each logical step with ease. Koy presents both a methodical and a simple series of steps taken over a 30-day period, covering the initial setup of the blog (or modification to existing ones), all the way through to the final success phase. Koy provides a simple worksheet for you to use to get your own blog branding going properly.

My first reaction was just what does blog branding mean? Koy defines this: “A brand is the essence of a company, website, person or anything someone could ever want to market.” “It is a promise to … your readership. It sets the expectation for what readers will get from both your blog and from you in every interaction.” Koy makes the keen distinction between “brand identity,” which is the concept that a brand owner wants their public to embrace, versus the “brand image,” which is how the public actually perceives the brand. The goal is to make these to points of view the same, which you can do if you follow the steps Koy provides.

The book also presents in easy to follow steps how to use social marketing, and to use analytics to obtain actual statistical results. It covers many of the varieties of web traffic “conversion” (Google Analytics) and how to use them to help turn your website traffic into actual income. Koy discusses how to use opportunities to blog on other sites, basics of merchandising, and the promoting of your products or services. No step is overlooked, as far as I can tell.

This is a very readable book that can help you go from an idea into a working, successful blog, one that can also make you money. I give this book 5 stars.