Top 10 Tips for Effective Blogging for Authors

Top 10 Tips for Effective Blogging for Authors

Here are some great blogging tips from my Australian friend, 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.

Joanna Penn - Writing, self-publishing, print-on-demand, internet sales and marketing . . . for your book. http://www.TheCreativePenn.com

Thank you to Dana Lynn Smith for posting this info at http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/book_marketing_maven/2009/02/-top-10-tips-for-effective-blogging-for-authors.html