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ОглавлениеBlog to Build Your Readership Community
“A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.”
—Lee Odden, author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing
IT WAS IN 2006 that we really began to feel the change in the publishing industry brought on by individual empowerment in the digital age. First the music business radically changed, starting with music downloads; and then the movie industry, starting with streaming video; and then publishing, starting with ebooks. Global business was shifting on its axis. It was in 2006 that Time magazine awarded the Person of the Year Award to “YOU” instead of to a single person as in the past. Lev Grossman’s article in Time on December 25, 2006, said, “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter…. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”
The world has become sufficiently tech-connected to enable us to interact, collaborate with, and create a community around our interest with a global crowd. Marketing specialists consistently encourage bloggers to rise above this noise level, but what a discouraging concept! Imagine moving into the midst of a huge crowd and being told you must rise above it. How can you create a blog with sufficient pull among the 156 million+ blogs published on the web today?
Tumblr has more than 101.7 million blogs with 44.6 billion blog posts
WordPress.com has more than 63 million blogs
LiveJournal reports having 62.6 million blogs
Weebly states it has more than 12 million blogs
Blogster has more than 582,754 blogs
Since the rise of blogging in the late 1990s, bloggers have discovered time and again that certain elements enable their blogs to successfully stand out from the crowd, and we share those elements with you here. This chapter shows how to draw your audience into your specialization in your genre, your unique value, and your subject matter expertise through blogging and outlines efficient strategies and best practices that will get you to your online community quickly and efficiently.
Your Blog Is About More Than Content
A blog is by definition a web log or web journal, but it’s much more than that. A blog is your own instant publishing platform; your blog entries accumulate to form a body of journalism. When you attract and form an online community, they begin to interact with you and each other, which grows your book audience. Use blogging wisely to publish well, and you will find an audience ready and waiting for your book.
Your blog is your self-published online magazine, where you are the editor, writer, and publisher. Your blog’s built-in powerful tool is comment-enabled social networking. Your blog showcases you, displaying your subject matter expertise, personal interests, and thoughts behind the scenes of your book(s). And here’s the most powerful part: Once your blog readership numbers increase, it begins to exert an invisible pull of its own that attracts those who you didn’t contact or expect to contact, but who are out there searching for you and the help, advice, and value add that you offer. The more effort you put into your blog up front, the stronger your blog’s momentum will be and the less effort you’ll have to put into it later on.
Your blog’s drawing power contributes not only to your book’s success but also to your overall success as an author. Authors can’t see their whole readership, but they need to remember that a good-sized segment of the audience reading an online web journal includes media talent scouts in search of content, speakers, and more.
To mobilize the crowded web to work for you and to increase your book audience, first and foremost, direct your blog to the interests of your readers. Once readers see their needs and interests met, they feel a connection and take interest in you and then the best possible next step takes place: sharing this interest with their friends. This expands your readers’ networks to add to your own. In addition, as journalists, radio and television talent scouts, literary agents, and publishing editors all hunt for subject matter experts with a large audience, we add our networks to yours. Start tapping into the networks of each individual who finds and likes your blog. What grows your blogging audience is not so much a special cleverness, an ability to sell yourself, or having special marketing tricks; it’s how you maximize connections with others, showing authenticity, sincerely caring for and responding to your audience, and delivering to their needs.
At our literary agency, we scour the web daily to find authors who are subject matter experts and have a large following. Is that you? Can we find you? The same questions apply to fiction authors: if you are not findable, you will not be contacted by media scouts. As agents, we’re hit with tough requirements in presenting authors to publishers, such as how many followers and readers the author has, what the author platform presence includes, where and how the author shows up in person, the possibility of video or audio, and how many followers they have in each venue. The reason publishers ask us to find writers who have an established audience applies equally to self-published authors: It’s purely business. The larger the established audience, the better it’s ensured that when the book is published, there will be buyers.
Authors expand readership by consistently increasing their own presence through blogs, then showing up in comments and contributions on others’ networks. When I find you, a potential author to present to a publisher, I expand your audience by plugging you into our agency following, and then with the publisher who has their own following, and then with the bookstore buyers who have large book buyer databases. By starting a blog, you automatically begin to expand your reach by tapping into the reach of others; by commenting on others’ blogs and exchanging guest blog posts, you expand your reach even further.
Side Note: Over decades I’ve searched for and found many hundreds of author clients online now signed to book contracts, proof that publishing contracts can and do appear “out of the blue” for subject matter experts who can write and have an established audience. By following the 14 steps in building your author platform outlined in these pages, you are putting yourself in a position to become the next author discovery.
Blogging Is Beyond an Advantage, It’s Essential
Recent surveys of book blog readers indicate that over half of all buyers buy books primarily based on the influence of the authors’ blogs! Consider the power of doubling your own audience, that is, those who pay attention to author web journals, by connecting to who you are, your behind-the-scenes thoughts and preferences, what you think and feel, why you’re a writer or subject matter expert, and the value add you are bringing to them. A major advantage to your blog, then, is the sheer fact of writing it, giving the inside scoop on you as the leading force of your book and opening the door to dialogue through comment boxes.
It’s a fact that businesses that blog get more web visitors and interest than businesses that don’t. Blogs create a loyal community of users that leads to higher sales, and businesses with blogs attain 20% more business than businesses that do not.
The Edelweiss searchable catalog created by Mark Evans at edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com correlates book mentions on blogs with point-of-sale information and ranks the results. The correlation between blogs and increased book sales is dramatic.
Once you’ve created your author website as described in Chapter 1, the most important task facing you is defining your blogging strategy and execution. Your author blog, created well, is the single best promotion avenue to supercharge sales of your books.
In the first decade of my publishing career as an editor for two major publishing houses, I believed that idea is king and that every move should be predicated on just the integrity of ideas. It took more than a decade for the reality of the book industry to catch up with my awareness; publishing is an industry that creates a product like any other business. This was a blow to realize, and I have seen authors with great ideas get shocked that their book did not get published, or that once published, did not become an instant top seller! I’m hoping this awareness will boost your own author career: A book is merchandise in the form of bound pages and a glossy cover, with a price tag, and must sell in large quantities to be successful.
Your author blog jump-starts the proving ground: that is, the existence of your readership community; the readers who comment who are likely to buy your book and tell their friends about how great your book is; and the potential numbers in your expanded network of those who will buy your book. And just as a crowded restaurant looks more attractive than an empty one, community starts taking off on its own once it reaches a threshold size. In today’s chaotic publishing climate, with increasing numbers of books being traditionally published and self-published, authors must attract a community, and maintaining a blog creates an important place to do it.
Here’s a basic all-purpose author blog strategy to get started:
1 Start your hosted blog, following the steps in this chapter.
2 Choose a blog type from the list in the next section to suit your subject matter interest and expertise.
3 Commit to a blog schedule and stick to it. Do not stop. Daily blogging is excellent, but twice or even once a week is fine as long as you are consistent.
4 Encourage comments and respond to every single comment and question, the same day if you can. For us, our morning coffee is the optimum time for audience interaction.
5 Ask guest bloggers for added posts and become a guest blogger for others.
6 Promote your blog. Link your blog to every personal and web presence you have: sites, social networks, training, speaking, etc. Post your blog URL on your business card and in your email signature line.
There is a tremendous freedom in blogging in that you make every decision about what you want to blog about and you can use any format under the sun. That said, tremendous freedom can and does bring tremendous chaos. Create a method of organizing your blog and your blogging at the outset. Just as chapters organize a book, posts organize your blog and present best in a format similar to consecutive articles in a published journal. Whatever method you choose, be consistent with your formatting and the level of your interactivity.
Three types of blogs are used by most of our author clients or are used in combination:
Blog as “DVD extras.” Movie DVDs carry a lot of extras: outtakes, directors’ cuts, deleted scenes, that is, everything behind the scenes. The same goes for author blogs: Many of our author clients use this leading blog format to keep audience interest. The very successful blog by Waterside author David Meerman Scott can be found at webinknow.com. David’s blog, titled Web Ink Now, is ranked in AdAge Power 150 as one of the top marketing blogs, a combination of topics that his readers are interested in that does not directly promote his book. Waterside client Bill Evans also uses the DVD extra–type format for his blog at billevansbanjo.com/blog. Note that both of these blogs speak to audience interests in an interesting, consistent, and short format with accompanying visuals.
For fiction authors, the outtake is a great format for behind-the-scenes looks at the books and movies you like with accompanying reviews, information about your characters, plots, locations, and themes of your books. Or print a segment of your book on your blog and add comments along the lines of directors’ cuts on DVDs. Mine your own database for original sources of writing you’ve done to post in your blog: letters, diaries, random observations, poems, or travel observations.
Blog as Question & Answer Forum. This format is the definite winner in terms of blog type, used by successful authors, in nonfiction and also in fiction. The Q&A format can be used not only to teach how-to’s and skills but also has the benefit of reaching behind the scenes for readers to ask and find out the inspiration for a story, how the writing process works, what inspires a writer, etc. The Q&A format is a tool with major practical advantages for authors, including:
Simplicity
Ease of plugging in content generated by others in the form of questions, which leads to cooperative networking
Built-in audience interaction
Helping and giving deeper insight to others
Establishing subject matter expertise, depth, and added dimension
Consistently refreshed and 100% tailored content that improves search engine optimization (SEO) and, best of all, draws returning customers to find out what the next Q&A dialogue will be
Successful Q&A blogs are found all over the web and used by many of our successful Waterside authors, including Andy Rathbone (andyrathbone.com), who uses this format to respond to issues his audience encounters, and Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor.com), whose Q&A is the centerpiece of his author site’s landing page.
A number of Waterside author clients write fiction as well as nonfiction, and these same techniques cross over to the world of fiction author visibility also. Fiction writers can check out Tee Morris’ blog at teemorris.com, who writes science fiction, steampunk, and fantasy.
Collective blogs. Use power in numbers: authors with like interests have formed collective blogs, where various authors contribute to posting. Contributing to a collective site, authors are able to increase the size of their following by posting to their collective networks. This type of blog is fully loaded with content and is an announcement platform for upcoming dates, lectures, book releases, and schedules. One example is our author client Winslow Yerxa, who blogs at the collective site harmonicasessions.com.
Learn about Technorati (technorati.com), the search engine for rating blogs. It looks at SEO tags and the number of blogs that link to your blog to give you a blog rating. Technorati lists the top 100 blogs, a blog directory, instructions for submitting a guest blog, and much more.
Encourage Online Sharing with Your Blog
In their second edition of Blogging to Drive Business, author clients Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt show how to foster your readership community through online sharing in your blog, suggesting that readers can have a sense of ownership within your blog space. Rebecca’s blog (rebeccacoleman.ca) creates a sense of community by addressing customer interests stated in comments. The blog advantage is interactive content, so encourage a strong community to form around your posts. “In some cases Internet users will create groups, fan pages, or their own blogs dedicated to various products or services they like,” Rebecca says. “Opening up similar access and playgrounds for discussion in your own online space can work to your advantage … the community might not necessarily be an actual page, forum, or comments section, but you’ll find that your readers will become your blog’s evangelists.”
Encourage blog conversation starting with reading comments, respond to them in a way that continues the conversation beyond, and then allow and encourage readers to share your content with their own social networks. Ask what they think and what their communities think about an issue to solicit comments. Here are more blog sharing tips from Rebecca and Eric’s book:
To ensure tools are available, provide links and Share This buttons on your blog posts by using a service like AddThis. You can encourage readers to share your link through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit and through Facebook.
Use a plugin from Twitter such as Tweetmeme to abbreviate links for tweets.
When readers share your content on their blogs, they can just link back to your post; you can make that link visible from your site.
Remember that blogging is about public sharing that builds your author brand! Whenever your posts are shared, you win as the exposure for your author brand and your book increases along with your ability to be found.
In the last chapter, we told you why you need to have a home base on the web, a site to serve as the magnet for all your writing endeavors. When you’re just starting out, maybe you want to test the waters a little bit. See some proof of what we’re talking about without going to the trouble (and expense) of finding a web host and registering a domain. In this case, often the best solution is to set up a blog on a hosted site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress.com. These are places where you can publish articles every day at no cost to you. The advantage of these particular sites for writers is not just the simplicity of setup and maintenance, but also the ability to reach many people through the communities around the platform.
There are many places on the web that will host your blog site, but we recommend choosing one of the big players: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, or WordPress.com. Where you choose to place your blog is largely a matter of personal preference. These sites will all help you find your audience through SEO and an existing community of bloggers. They are easy to set up and maintain. All of them have mobile apps that allow you to connect to your blog and post from a smartphone or tablet. Perhaps the availability of your preferred address on a particular host will be a deciding factor.
In this section, we’ll show you the defining characteristics of three platforms: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, and WordPress.
The idea behind Blogger is to give anyone a drop-dead simple way to have a blog. All the software you need to create and maintain a blog exists in your web browser, and you don’t have to install a thing. This has been true from Blogger’s beginnings as an independent website right around the dawn of the 21st century, through its acquisition by Google, straight through to today. It is also one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web.
Because Google owns Blogger, you can easily get yourself a Blogger account with your existing Google account. Blogger integration with other Google properties like YouTube and Google+ also offers several advantages:
Linking to YouTube videos in your posts is a snap! In the post editor, you can search for relevant videos or link to your YouTube channel.
You can automatically create a Google+ page for your blog that will share your posts with that audience, offering another way to interact with your readers.
Perhaps most importantly, you can use Google AdSense and include affiliate links to earn money with your blog.
The downside to Blogger is mostly about control. Unlike WordPress and Movable Type/TypePad, you can’t run Blogger as the blog page of your own site. You can link your existing domain to your Blogger site, but you should only do this if your site is just a blog. If, for example, you want to directly sell ebooks or other content, you can’t do that on Blogger, though you can post affiliate links from other e-commerce sites.
If you like having lots of choices for how your blog will look, you’ll find Blogger theme options quite limited, especially compared to WordPress.com. If you’re one of those folks who complains about too many choices, however, choosing from the seven basic choices (with different color schemes) could be quite pleasant.
Whereas Blogger is for folks who just want to blog, TypePad from SAY Media is a specialized site host and content management system. It has been around a long time, and though it hasn’t gotten the same media attention as its rivals in recent years, it’s still among the top 500 trafficked websites.
TypePad’s big brother, Movable Type (MT), was one of the first industrial-strength blogging platforms, starting right around the same time as Blogger. A few months after Google bought the company that created Blogger, the MT developers (called Six Apart) ended the practice of distributing MT for free. The hosted version started in 2003 and has always been a paid, commercial product. When noncommercial bloggers who still had to install MT and connect it to a database (no easy task in those days) had to start paying a fee to run MT, many fled to the upstart WordPress. Eventually, Movable Type 4 was released as open source software. Today you can install Movable Type on a server for free; TypePad costs around US$100 annually.
We don’t have to tell you about the power of Blogger’s connection with Google. What may surprise you is the reach of WordPress—more than three-quarters of all blogs on the web run on WordPress (either self-hosted or at WordPress.com)! WordPress is among the top 25 sites in terms of traffic.
You can use WordPress either on your own web space (using a hosting company as described in Chapter 1) or on WordPress.com. Sometimes you’ll hear WordPress veterans talk about “self-hosted WordPress sites” or “WordPress-dot-org sites” to refer to WordPress running on a server. Self-hosted WordPress is typically updated with new features twice a year, with occasional smaller updates that are usually focused on plugging security holes. Depending on your hosting company, you may be responsible for keeping your site updated. The bigger hosts (and WordPress.com) handle this for you.
If you’re serious about blogging, and really do want to try out blogging on a hosted system before creating your own website, we highly recommend starting out at WordPress.com.
Consider these advantages:
Large and strong community of users and developers.
Excellent technical support.
More than 100 free theme choices (and more than a handful of premium themes). When you choose a self-hosted location, hundreds of free and premium themes become available.
An easy way to determine how your audience is building through detailed statistics.
Freshly Pressed on the WordPress.com home page highlights dozens of posts every day, giving you the chance to shine.
Simple export of your dot-com site to a self-hosted WordPress site (even porting your audience to the new site for a small fee). WordPress can usually import posts from another blog system, too.
WordPress.com users often get to see and work with new features before they are released to self-hosted users.
Regardless of what vendor you choose, you will have to think about these things:
What to name your blog.
What address (uniform resource locator, or URL) to use to help people find your blog.
Writing your About page.
A few things to think about when naming your blog:
Most likely, the title should reflect the primary topic(s) you expect to cover in the blog.
Use a pithy title! Both Blogger and WordPress allow a subtitle or tagline that allows for more expansive explanations of your blog.
If you are expecting to create a separate site for your book (see Chapter 11), avoid giving your author website blog the same title.
Don’t just toss off a title! Give it some thought, unless you plan to make the blog private while you work out your topic schedule and other details. While you can nearly always change the title of your blog, this is part of your brand. Often the title will also be reflected in your web address (which you can’t change).
Consider these facts:
Every site on the web has a unique, specific address.
WordPress is the only vendor that talks about its size; they say about 100,000 new blogs are created every day.
The reality is that whoever you choose to host your blog, millions of blogs are already registered on your chosen site, so finding your unique address can be tricky. Always check first for your blog’s title (or some shortened version). If you’re focusing on a particular topic, look for an address that people interested in that topic might search for. You may want to start with your name, if it’s not especially common. Have some backup ideas ready. You’ll learn right away whether the address is available.
No matter what topics you explore, your blog should always reflect your personality. Every blog vendor lets you create a static page that allows readers to find out what your blog is about. Often the first thing a reader does after finding an interesting blog post is check the About page to see if the blog is worth following or subscribing to. This makes your About page critical in finding and building your audience.
Use the About page to describe what prompted you to start the blog, the topics you cover, and as much as you want to reveal about yourself. Remember that you’re making a first impression, so imagine what your reader wants to know about the person behind the words.
Now that you are set up with your blog, the next step is posting blog entries consistently all the way to your book’s publication.
Start now: Timing is a critical element of your blog, so start your blog well before your book publishes, as ongoing buildup promotion is essential. Blog to jump-start the success of your book, as you’re putting a hook into the pond of multimillions of web searchers who want to connect with you.
Look for model blogs: Before you create your blog, spend time reviewing possible models for your blog. When you see what’s already working out there in the crowd for existing authors, you can create your own style based on those successes. Perhaps you’ve already identified the popular blogs in your niche. If you haven’t, here are some examples of blogs that show author brand, personal touch, audience-interest-driven posts, and clear format:
Tricia Goyer (triciagoyer.com/blog)
Mary DeMuth (marydemuth.com/blog)
Thom Hartman (thomhartmann.com/thom/blog)
Additional examples of preferred author blogs can be found at internet writingjournal.com/authorblogs.
Choose a template: Choose a format close to your favorite model blog and then customize it from there to save time. Review the different formats at blogsrater.com and technorati.com.
Choose a theme: Themes (aka templates) define the look and feel of your site. They take some of the pain out of choosing a color scheme, display font, and column size that can easily paralyze the average non-design-oriented writer. How you choose your theme differs depending on the site, but you can usually get a snapshot or preview of how your site would look with each theme applied. Click the picture you like best, and voilà! Your site will look like that.
This is where you can change your mind most often. Theoretically, you could change your site’s theme daily (even hourly, but don’t plant that in your brain), but that would drive away readers who come to expect that blog content is updated frequently, but that your style remains consistent.
While each blog host offers different choices for its themes, focus on these areas:
Number of columns: One-column templates focus all the attention on your writing. Great for personal journals, not so great for building a community. A sidebar column with pointers to other areas of your site allows readers to navigate better, view the types of topics you cover, and perhaps see other sites that you visit (a “blogroll”). Add a second sidebar column for symmetry if you have a lot of sidebar content.
Column width: You can usually specify a fixed width for each column. Often you can choose a “flexible” width that depends on your reader’s screen size.
Colors: As a writer, you want to make sure your content is readable, so choose your background colors and fonts accordingly.
We operate in a new paradigm of web-based promotion that requires thinking and communicating not from your own perspective, but from the perspective of your audience. This is a new community era that does not take well to selling. Instead, communities want everyone to share great things with them. It means joining your audience community, paying attention to and responding to comments, and giving solid valuable information instead of advertising. What does your audience want? What motivates your readers? What are their hopes, dreams, and needs? The more you know the answers to these questions, take them into consideration, and deliver solutions, the more you will build audience for your writing.
With valuable content presented in the way that buyers can connect to, they will be naturally drawn to your books. Remember, top publishers have always understood that audience definition is key to creating the success of any book.
Your first blog post is best created as an introduction to yourself in a Welcome post. Shake hands, tell folks what you’re doing, and show that you are sharing and searching for friends with similar interests. Because the content of your blog is by its nature personal, readers want to see a flavor of the real person in the author.
Your blog post impact is a combination of content and presentation, so use these elements in each blog post:
Strong headline: Use a great title and first sentence with SEO keyword tags.
Date of post: This is typically added automatically by your blog system.
Blog post text: Content ideas below. Shorter posts have become the norm, but maximum length is one short, edited intro paragraph, two or three body paragraphs, and one final short sentence, with second level subheads. Leave the last sentence as an “open for discussion” feel to attract the crowd, such as a question, a vote, or a request to comment.
Visuals are important: Be sure to include photos in your blog. Images of 200 × 200 pixels are best for sharability. A related image or logo can work for this purpose. Use a file name and descriptive text caption. Your camera phone or iStock photos are fine. Videos are also a big plus and discussed later in this book.
Links: To your other author platform locations, to friends and associate blogs, related articles and posts, etc.
Comment boxes: You moderate what comments will appear. Try to get as many comments as you can, starting with asking your friends and associates for comments, and sharing your own comments with them reciprocally. Responsiveness counts: Answer each and every one of them.
Permalinks: When you post, two things happen immediately: The post goes to the top of your site’s front page, and a specific page gets created for that post. That specific page, called a permalink, breathes life into your post after it ceases to be new. One reason blogging is successful as a format is because it combines the immediacy of the always-current front page with the always-available archived posts. It is that permanent link that makes your posts available to search. So after you’ve written this amazing and informative post explaining the roots of the Great Depression of the 1930s to modern readers, that post does not disappear off your front page and into the dustbin. Search engines track these permalink pages to allow people to find them years down the road. After you’ve been blogging for a few years, you’ll be surprised (and occasionally amused) by the amount of traffic your old posts get. If you either link to someone else’s post for commenting on your blog or want to notify someone of a specific post of yours, don’t point to the blog’s home page; make sure you use the permalink, too.
Creating Content for Blog Posts
How do you tailor content to your audience once you understand the needs and interests of your audience? As an example, our author clients form a large audience for this book. I’ve tirelessly listened to authors’ issues and concerns about platform for many years and am responding with the solution—this book. I know well that my literary agency clients generally don’t have much time available after doing their day-to-day jobs and writing a book; these clients have demanded a complete, pre-digested, easy-to-follow formula for creating their own author platform. In deciding the table of contents and coverage, we have tailored the content of this book for that audience, which we understand well. That’s why we included “best of” recommendations instead of endless choices, why we don’t use marketing jargon, and why we’re presenting a complete system under one roof instead of making our readers chase multiple tips that are scattered around the Internet.
Knowing the time constraints of our own authors, we’re willing to bet that you don’t have much time for posting original content every day, so try posting at least once a week, without fail, up until the time of your book’s publication. To save you time, here are content and posting shortcuts.
The main thing to remember is that posting original, content-rich blog entries, however often you post, keeps your blog fresh so your readership will not migrate elsewhere.
