Today I wanted to let those of you who don’t follow my adventures on twitter know that I have a few updates in regards to my upcoming technical blogging book, which I announced a while ago.

The most important update is that the book is not going to be self-published. Instead, after receiving offers from a couple of major publishers earlier this year, I decided to publish the book with The Pragmatic Bookshelf. My experience with them has been more than satisfactory so far.

The book is going to be about 250 pages, and at the moment I’ve completed about 70% of it. The exact title and cover are not set in stone yet, but there is a concrete possibility that it will head into beta soon. This means that the book is likely to become purchasable before it’s fully finished, even though this hasn’t officially been confirmed yet.

Early technical reviewers have provided extremely encouraging feedback. Among those who’ve shared their valued thoughts are well-know world class bloggers who found the book to be packed with useful advice.

To give you a better idea of what the book is all about, I’ll share the (very provisional and subject to change) Table of Contents (as it appears at this early stage) here.

Table of Contents

0. Introduction

Part I — Plan it

1. What kind of blog are you going to run?
1.1 Solo vs Collective
1.2 General vs Niche
1.3 Pundit vs Instructional
1.4 Business Blogs
1.5 What’s Next

2. A rock-solid plan for your blog
2.1 Define Your Blog’s Main Topic
2.2 Analyze the Size of Your Niche
2.3 Give Readers a Compelling Reason To Stick Around
2.4 Set Goals for Your Blog
2.5 Choosing and Registering a Domain Name

Part II — Build it

3. Setting up your blog
3.1 Choose Your Blogging Software and Hosting
3.2 Installing WordPress
3.3 Configuring WordPress
3.4 Enhancing WordPress With Plugins
3.5 What’s Next

4. Customizing and fine-tuning your blog
4.1 Pick a Professional Theme
4.2 Enable Tracking of Your Site’s Visitors
4.3 Customize Your Sidebar
4.4 Encourage Social Media Sharing
4.5 Win Over Subscribers
4.6 Don’t Get in Trouble, Use Disclaimers
4.7 Master On-page SEO With Platinum SEO
4.8 Performance Considerations
4.9 Enable Code Highlighting in Your Posts
4.10 What’s Next

5. Creating remarkable content
5.1 Content Is King
5.2 Write for the Web
5.3 Can Linkbaiting Be Ethical?
5.4 Write Catchy Headlines
5.5 Develop Your Own Voice
5.6 Where to Find Ideas for Your Posts
5.7 Case Study: Math-Blog.com’s Headlines
5.8 Get Readers to Explore Your Content
5.9 Dealing With Copyright Violations
5.10 Back Up Your Content
5.11 What’s Next

6. Producing content regularly
6.1 What’s the Post Frequency, Kenneth?
6.2 Consistency Is Queen
6.3 On What Days Should You Post?
6.4 Schedule Time to Blog
6.5 Manage Your Time With the Pomodoro Technique
6.6 Surviving Writer’s Block
6.7 Get Others to Write for You
6.8 What’s Next

Part III — Promote it

7. Promoting your blog
7.1 Market It and They Will Come
7.2 Correcting a Self-Sabotaging Mindset
7.3 Perform On-Page and Off-Page SEO
7.4 Not All Links Are Created Equal
7.5 Guest Blogging on Other Blogs
7.6 Other Forms of Article Marketing
7.7 Participate in the Community
7.8 The Dark Side of Link Building
7.9 Promoting Your Articles on Social Networks
7.10 Promote on Technical Social News Sites
7.11 Case Study: ProgrammingZen.com’s Referral Traffic
7.12 What’s Next

8. Understanding traffic statistics
8.1 Baseline vs Spike Traffic
8.2 Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider
8.3 Interpreting Visit Quantity and Quality
8.4 Where Do They All Come From?
8.5 Analyzing Google Analytics and Clicky Statistics
8.6 Keeping Track of Your Blog’s Growth
8.7 What’s Next

9. Building a community around your blog
9.1 Engage Readers
9.2 Supplement Your Blog With Community Tools
9.3 Forms Of Criticism
9.4 Your Mantras When Dealing With Criticism
9.5 What’s Next

Part IV — Benefit from it

10. Making money from your blog
11. Promoting your own products
12. Benefiting from your blog to the fullest

Part V — Scale it

13. Scaling your blogging activities
14. Beyond blogging: your strategy for social media
15. Growing your online presence
16. Final words of advice

If you are interested in receiving ongoing news about the book, you can sign up for my spam-free, very infrequent, announcement newsletter here.