The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years. There are now
over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, a popular blog search engine.
According to demographics collected by the Pew Internet Study, blogs have
become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area.
You can use blogs to:
• Develop an audience for your work
• Promote your book
A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle
that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into
categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group
related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent
the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as
a bibliography, showing references to source material.
How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches
individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo and
MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and
posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover
these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular
blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and
link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site
in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.
Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to
track important information such as number of visitors, page views,
referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and
comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of
popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test
and select material to be included in your book.
Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a
great marketing platform. For example, you can promote your book on a
special page, featuring your bio, a book description, excerpts, press
releases and testimonials. Thus your blog can double as a book website.
You can also promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.
A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs,
where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a
low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work.
Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a
traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers
are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find
promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your
audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.
Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are
developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same
audience. Give it a try!
(lnformation from Tom Masters, author of Blogging Quick and Easy)