Simpleology Blogging Course – Quick Review

I took the free course from Simpleology on blogging, and it was pretty good.
I would especially recommend it to anyone who is new to blogging.

A few grapes:

• Had good information about how to bring traffic to your site.
• Had a proper level of technical explanation—not too much, not too little.
• Had good “getting started” info.

A few gripes:

• They seemed to be targeting it to people who are already blogging. In order to get it free, you had to post on your blog about it. But people who are blogging are probably ahead of the curve. How to target would-be-bloggers? Good question, but probably not by having them post on their blog.
• Trackbacks! Don’t get me stared about trackbacks! They had the gall to recommend them. As much as the technology has a good purpose, the moment I turned it on I started to get very nasty spam. I quickly turned that feature off.
• The content was not specific to my needs. Not that the folks over at Simpleology are going to come up with a course specific to fiction writers, but I’ll tell you, Randy Ingermanson was much more practical today when he posted about blogging and branding as it relates to fiction writers.

Randy’s main advice today:

Your mission as a publicity-hungry novelist is to FIND A WAY to connect your fiction to the NONFICTION topic that your novel is “about”. Then you can [blog] about that forever.

As I’ve said before: Thanks, Randy!