There are so many claims on your time as an author, including marketing, speaking, possibly organising book production, and researching future books. So why would you commit to running an author blog as well?
Many writers, including those writers at Blog Chicks, share their daily joys and trials freely in their blog, as well as engage with their book readers. But for us authorpreneurs, we want to give great value and attract really specific readers to our message.
The message behind your books is important; it goes beyond just one book at one time. Your people are looking for information that will answer a query and put their minds at rest, or fill them with hope to achieve their dreams.
Your main aim may be to make your book a success. But in order to do that, you first need an audience. An audience can come to you gifted free of charge, via Google search and keywords (or Facebook and exciting posts) and raffles, or it can come via expenses like: Amazon ads, Facebook ads, newsletter ads, and the like.
If you are relying on a free blog site to get constant search rankings, that is not usually possible, but you can at least link to other bloggers easily and have no technical hassles (see Google Blogger, Blogspot, WordPress.com).
Me, I don’t mind technical issues, because these I get fixed by a freelancer, allowing me to learn better plugins and methods to move forward. This website has a particularly fast hosting at Siteground, an awesome Aussie email system, and is on a paid theme which comes with many clever, time-saving features. Find out more in our quick guide about author website/blog setup. Off the track, but perhaps it’s good to know how much effort has gone into creating an author’s blog.
Three Golden Keys to a Successful Author Blog
The Three Golden Rules for creating a winning author blog are:
- Relevancy to your key topic and its audience
- Consistency of effort
- A conversational tone that includes, rather than excludes.
Maintaining a relevant topic focus is not easy with a journal-style blog, however, with a few tweaks you could keep to a single angle (make sure it gives value) and thus enhance your author brand.
Under this single angle, you can have different topics and keep things popular. E.g. say you have a career book, your categories might be: image and branding, resume writing, what’s hot in employment, career change.
Consistent effort, I believe, starts with a calendar that suits you and your desires for visibility online. Rankings wise, I have seen more progress with weekly blogging. This increases prospective enquiries. Taking holidays affected these rankings and new visits, but if getting behind, you can top up your visits with more emails or guest posting on high vis blogs.
For an example of a conversational tone that includes, in this case, small business people who may be novices in marketing, see: http://www.digitalbrisbane.com.au/blog
Future Blog Improvements
When you get along the blogging road a bit, creating and maintaining a funky look and feel to your post images and sidebar content is a good idea. Can’t really go past Kindlepreneur.com for this, as well as Dave’s supreme knowledge of keyword attraction for authors. Why be boring and bland if you can manage to whip up some author blog imagery with Canva, the easy design tool?
Do you have a blog you’re proud of? Please share the name of it and its audience below…