OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
You can write a blog enthusiastically for a few weeks and then you start to wonder why you are spending the time and effort on it. Effective blogging means having traffic, comments, and people responding to your writing. It may mean more book sales if that is your target.
Whatever your blogging goals, here are some tips to make your blogging effective:
1. Write good content. Blogging is not a constant sales pitch. If you have good content, people will click to learn more about you and that is where you can include your book.
2. Link freely to others and share traffic. Blogging is all about surfing between sites and offering useful information. Credit other blogs and sites with links and comments. This may also provide more traffic for you. Use trackbacks so they know you have linked to them.
3. Love your Blog. Your topic needs to be one you can sustain and something you are interested in so it is not a chore to post. Maybe you only have a plan to blog for 6 months around your book launch – if so, make it a top 6 months by posting daily. If it is a longer term project, then posting every few days is fine.
4. Blog regularly so the search engines visit you often. Every post you make is a new page, so after a year you will have over 300 pages on the web with your name on it.
5. Be succinct. Don’t write really long blog posts. Consider breaking them into two or more parts to keep them easy to read. Break up the text with sub-headings and include pictures if you can as people scan your post looking for the salient information.
6. Use keywords in your text so the search engines index your blog properly. For WordPress blogs, use the SEO plugin that allows you to target keywords.
7. Blog your niche. People will come back if you blog on a topic they are interested in. Blog in your genre or about your book specifically. If necessary, have separate blogs for separate topics so you can maintain a niche audience.
8. Blog multi-media with videos or audio as well as text and images. It is very easy to make a video with MovieMaker so you can do book trailers, or videos of you talking about your book.
9. Read other blogs so you know what is going on in your niche. Subscribe by email or use a reader. I use Google reader with my Gmail account to keep tabs on the blogs I read regularly.
10. Encourage comments from readers and answer any queries. Make sure you also comment on other people’s blogs.
This is the third in a series on blogging for authors.
See also: (1) 10 reasons authors should have a blog and (2) Blogs: How to create your own blog
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Thanks, this was incredibly helpful. I saw several things I’m going to start doing to increase the effectiveness of my blog.
hi, what sore of things should I wannabe author blog about or have links to???? thanks!
Hi Jacky, the best thing to do is to subscribe to blogs in the niche you write in and see what they do e.g. check out http://www.murderati.com/ for crime writers. Modelling success is a great way to start. Also check out Top 10 Blogs for writers
http://writetodone.com/2010/12/21/top-10-blogs-for-writers-2011-the-winners/
Wow a lot of spelling mistakes there, should slow down my typing and check before I post haha..
Okay, is that with RSS links? yes I will def. check that link out.
I’m not a published author yet but I’m working on it and I know authors should have a blog. At the moment I think I’m just going to write about well anything on my mind and all sorts of things. Also focus on a section on writers resources and information etc and maybe even a list of other writers blogs (if that’s okay to do). Just so IF I ever do get published an agent/publisher will see my blog and it will be full of content rather then a few posts 😉
I haven’t exactly got any books to show off or anything and for the life of me don’t actually know how to aquire a list of ‘followers’ or ‘friends’ or how to add any (guess it’s not like facebook) but hopefully someone eventually stumbles upon it! hehe.
Thanks Joanna!
Thank you Joanna. I’ve just discovered your website and am really enjoying it.
Joanna, great website. New to all this and am finding your information very useful. It’s pretty clear to me that the daunting nature of getting up to speed can and will put people off. As authors, many of us feel we’re “wasting time” on social media when we could be writing. But, it’s a necessary Evil–reference How to succeed in Evil–hah, see what I did there. So I’m going to attempt to Trackback this little entry–But I can’t find the TrackBack URL on your page. is it me?
DCF
I have trouble figuring out exactly what my niche IS, what genre my work actually falls into. I read a lot of authors, but can’t seem to find one that makes me go, “Yes, that’s just like me.”