This book explains how to take your WordPress blog and turn it into something special, a blog that sets it apart from the tens of thousands of other blogs online. Using as its example the “Chiliguru” blog, Mr Thewlis explains how to produce a blog that readers will take notice of and read every time you post new content. He starts with the basics, like setting your goals for the blog, designing it, incorporating image and video files, then goes on to offer “blog writing tips.” With so many bloggers, it’s important to incorporate good writing into your blog. Even though he stresses there aren’t any “set rules” to blogging, few people will read a blog that is boring or poorly written.

Search engine optimization is a hot topic in the blogosphere these days and Mr Thewlis devotes an entire chapter to this topic, discussing keywords, permalinks, tags and site maps. He also touches upon other ways of promoting your blog, how to analyze your blog stats, and more importantly ways of making money from your blog. There are also lots of good screen shots throughout that help explain different procedures.

I found this to be a highly enjoyable book. It’s clear Mr Thewlis put a lot of effort into showing the reader how to create a stand-out business blog.

Touted as a `beyond the basics’ book targeted towards business bloggers, WordPress for Business Bloggers delivers a wealth of WordPress and blogging knowledge in the context of a fictitious case study. I picked up this book as a way to jumpstart my involvement with WordPress after several years of involvement with other blogging tools. I was not at all disappointed with the results.

Based upon my experiences, I can confidently assert that no experience with WordPress is necessary to benefit from this book. The book states the assumption of such knowledge up front and, after that, never returns to WordPress basics. Ample materials on WordPress installation, operations and configuration can be found online and I appreciate that the book didn’t spend any time rehashing these items.

Instead of focusing on simpler procedural activities, the book weaves together the challenges of solving business issues for Chiliguru, a fictitious business blog, with advanced WordPress operations, guidance, and plugins. The book manages to bridge the challenges of running a day-to-day blog with WordPress-specific knowledge in a unique style. One would be hard pressed to cobble together the information and knowledge this book imparts from the web-based tutorials currently available on the Internet. Examples of the unique content covered in this book include:

* Search engine optimization, including coverage of keywords, permalinks, and sitemaps supported by a variety of WordPress plugins
* Integrating social networking content from Twitter and Facebook into WordPress blogs
* Blog statistics analysis with both WordPress stats and Google Analytics
* Integration of Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate programs into WordPress-based blogs
* Coverage of advanced technical topics including: increasing scalability via WP Super Cache, using WordPress MU for multi-blog environments, and backing-up, restoring and moving WordPress blogs.

If you’re looking for a beginners guide to WordPress, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve accumulated some basic experience with WordPress or another blogging engine and you’re looking for insight and knowledge to take your WordPress blog to the next level, you really can’t go wrong with this book.