Blog Marketing Strategies for Authors – 7 Success Rules

Want more book sales? Want your book to stand out from the crowd?

A blog helps you build a following, build a reputation in your book’s niche or genre, and increases book sales!

Choose to write blog posts that you add to your business website that speaks directly to your target audience.

The most important thing to remember is to write at least two entries a week. Make your posts compelling, professional, and inviting. Remember to ask people to leave their opinions and get some buzz going. Since you are an author – post points, character conflicts, or tips that relate to your book. If you are a service business, and have a book that tells what you do, a blog of useful information will keep bringing your audience back for more.

Success Example: In just 8 months, my own blog/site traffic doubled to a respectable 4,500 unique visitors a month. This happened because of LinkedIn and my 150 blog posts on book writing, book marketing, and social media marketing.

 

How Can You Keep your Blog Fresh?

Look at other places or blogs in your field to gain ideas. My favorite is joining LinkedIn groups that relate to your expertise. These people post discussions that they want information on. So, it makes sense to stay abreast of these, and comment as often as you can with useful information. These discussions or news articles keep my blog alive because they are up-to-the-minute how to’s on my 13 books’ topics.

Your blog articles attract your book audience to your site. When they trust you or like you and see you’re the author they want, they will buy from you.

What are the 7 Success Rules of Blogs?

1. Keep improving your blog.

Get educated with books and take teleseminars. Get a short phone social media coaching session for feedback to see if you’re on the right track.

2. Make sure your blog content arouses a discussion.

Ask questions at the end of the blog. Elicit opinions that keep it fresh.

3. Keep your blog simple.

Do what you can in the beginning. If your blog needs some graphics, or more style and tools, contact a webmaster who does this kind of work. You’d only need him/her for a few sessions.

4. Hire a professional person who is also a writer to give you feedback.

One comment that helped me was to keep the blog entries short and to the point because visitors have a short attention span. I wrote a blog article writing on how to write blog post in 500 words. Just make sure you get the opening hook right for your audience.

5. Respond to any comment that is relevant to the blog post.

This will keep your readers coming back so they will subscribe to your site and stay informed on what’s new. It’s best to answer within 24 hours.

6. Commit to a particular amount of time to make your blog get more readers.

For me, that’s writing blog entries 2-3 days a week for about 2 hours of creation time. I wait a day or two to submit after I get feedback by a professional business writer like myself. To some people, typos make your writing worth a lot less.

7. Comment on a discussion or news article on any LinkedIn group you belong to.

Get other comments through an email right to your door and choose to respond to the ones you can add good information to. Then, leave a benefit-driven blurb and link to your blog article when it’s appropriate.

You may be thinking, this is too much work or time. You are mistaken. Think of this as an investment to get a much bigger amount of your particular market to your website where your book offers are. Your sales funnel from free to fee is all important!

 

Think that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, so as you build each part of your book’s promotion platform, results will be so much larger than you thought when all parts are working together. For myself, the minute the blog went up and I marketed it in these ways, my number of target web visitors went up 57% each month, and is still growing according to my Google Analytics numbers and my Alexa.com rankings.

It’s consistency that counts. You are building a body of work that will eventually impress your market. Book buyers may not come right away.

To showcase your skills or your fiction drama, don’t let your blog die just because not many come or comment right away. Blog numbers often build slowly and naturally, unless your site already ranks high with Google and other search engines.

If you have a question, need advice, or have another great tip to add to this blog, feel free. It stimulates me and others and gets more questions answered.

Bio: Judy Cullins, 25-year book coach and author of 13 books including “LinkedIn Marketing: 8 Best Tactics to Build Book and Business Sales” and “Write your eBook Or Other Short Book Fast” offers you a free ebook when you subscribe at her site to receive free weekly writing and blog tips.