Many book marketing experts are advocates for blogging. I personally believe that having your own blog allows you to connect with your audience in ways that authors never experienced in the past. It is entirely possible to blog your way to more book sales. Quite a few authors, however, start blogging but give up early on. Why do they do this? More often than not – they are seeking instant gratification of some sort. While a blog has the potential to be a very effective book marketing tool, it can only be as successful as its writer.
So, how can writers market themselves using this sometimes inconspicuous tool?
- Be consistent. Many author blogs fail because the author never returns to update them (or does so on a very inconsistent schedule). You must choose a blogging schedule that works for you and stick with it. Even if you are only blogging once per week, stick to that and your visitors will know when to come back for more content.
- Be factual. Many times it’s necessary to conduct a bit of research to ensure the information you are posting to your blog is correct. Bloggers are not exempt from the rules of plagiarism, so you if are using someone else’s work, be sure to cite your sources.
- Be epic. You should begin every blog post with the goal of writing something that people will love. It should be something they want to share with their family and friends. To determine whether your content is “epic”, use the “Did you see that?” test. Summarize your blog post and try asking yourself (aloud): “Did you see that post about ____ (insert your summary here)?” If it doesn’t sound interesting to you, it’s not worthy of posting to your blog.
- Be interactive. When people comment on your blog, reply to them. You should aim to answer every blog comment. As your blog grows, this may not be feasible, but you should stay focused on doing this in the beginning.
- Be patient. This is perhaps the most important tip of all of these because the most successful bloggers (authors or otherwise), have to have a great deal of patience. Many times bloggers “talk to themselves” for months before they get even one comment on their blog. This is the time period that most blogs fail. In order to see any success from your blog, you must be able to stick with it.
- Be diligent. Make sure to proofread your posts before you publish them. Blatant grammatical/spelling errors can turn readers off of your blog. Keep the readers that take the time to visit your site by double checking your work for mistakes.
- Be savvy. Schedule your blog posts. If you know you won’t be available when you normally publish content, use the scheduling feature (if available) of your blogging platform to write the post in advance while sticking to your original schedule.
- Be friendly. Two ways you can increase your blog’s traffic are: linking to another blogger’s post within your content (they will likely get notification of this and visit your blog in return) and commenting on other blogger’s blog posts.
What other ways should you “be” to have a more successful blog?
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ABOUT ELISE L. CONNORS:
Elise works as the Manager of Author Support of Outskirts Press. She also contributes to the Outskirts Press blog at blog.outskirtspress.com. Elise and a group of talented book marketing experts assist not only published Outskirts Press authors, but also all authors and professionals who are interested in getting the best possible exposure for their book. |
Self Publishing Advisor 