Why is it important for an author, especially a self-published author, to blog? Let’s try to figure out in this blog post.
When getting on the social media bandwagon to promote their books, self-published authors go all out on the usual suspects Facebook, Twitter and more recently, Pinterest. LinkedIn gets its share of love too, but mostly it’s these other platforms that attract people, or more appropriately, readership, in general. But neglected blogs are a bad sign, a bad signal you send to your readers.
Even though you may not have fresh content to post on your blog everyday or every week, there are several ways to keep your blog alive. Here are a few guidelines to help you course through bloggers block:
1) How often should you blog?
Once a week is acceptable, so is once every other day. But what drives readership is not the frequency of blog posts, but the quality of the content you provide.
2) What if you don’t have something fresh and intelligent to share one week?
Re-purpose an old blog post, post reviews of your favorite or recently read books, invite people in the publishing world other authors, illustrators, artists, book marketing gurus to guest blog for you, post excerpts from your book and write something around the theme, post tips and ideas for writing inspiration, news about you, a video or audio clip of you talking about your present or upcoming projects, the possibilities are endless.
3) Is blogging really a powerful marketing tool?
Blogging can be thought of as an inbound marketing tool rather than an outbound one, which may make people squirm in protest. By blogging, you are: offering value content to people, enabling greater visibility for your brand (people are going to share your blogposts if they like them enough), and thus going viral without even directly attempting to. This will drive more traffic to you as a brand.
4) How do I engage my readership, and retain them?
There are any number of ways you can engage your readership: run contests to give away free copies of your book, ask questions or conduct polls that elicit participation, and respond to their comments and queries there’s nothing more valuable to a reader than real messages from authors they like and follow regularly.
5) Will I be featured as a top blogger on some sites?
How do I measure my success? The more link-backs you get, the more popular you will get. You can conduct a text experiment and check your stats don’t post anything for 1 week, and then post a couple of irresistible posts, and watch the number of hits escalate. Further, there are several sites that rank bloggers and you can also score an author rank on Google.
Share your blogging success (or failure) stories with us. And yes, we will help your comment go viral by linking to it on all our social media sites!