Blogging Your Way to Book Profits: Five Tips for a Successful Book Promotion Blog

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You created a blog to promote your book and you’re pretty happy with the way it looks and the intriguing content it offers potential readers. But so far the stampede of visitors—and buyers—hasn’t arrived and you’re not quite sure what, if any, effect your blog is having on your overall book promotion campaign. If this sounds familiar, you have plenty of company. The good news is that by doing a few simple things, you can greatly increase your traffic and your potential sales.

Here’s what to do:

1. Position Your Book Information in a Strategic Location

It sounds obvious, but many authors create a quality blog and then bury the information about their book in a location that blog visitors can’t find easily. Your blog shouldn’t be a blatant advertisement, but your visitors should be able to find information about your book the minute they reach your blog. Positioning a graphic image of your book’s cover plus a strategic link or two near the top of your blog’s sidebar should be enough to remind people that you’re the author of a book related to the blog’s topic.

2. Use Keywords Wisely

Every website, including your blog, should have a list of associated keywords, or keyword phrases, that describe the main topic of the site. For example, if your book is about spelunking, your target keywords could be “spelunking,” “caves,” and “cave exploration.” Although your blog content should never be contrived to suit keywords, you should keep your blog keywords in mind every time you write a post. Including relevant keywords in your blog headings, content, and linked text helps with search engine rankings. Be careful not to overdo the use of keywords, however, or you could be labeled a keyword spammer. Several strategic mentions of your keywords should be enough.

3. Offer an Email Subscription to Your Blog

Offering email delivery of your blog postings can help you drive additional traffic. Some readers may view your blog directly. Others may subscribe to your RSS feed. Offering email updates provides a third way to keep in touch with your audience, one that may already be very familiar to readers who don’t use RSS yet or are put off by complex-sounding technology.

Some services to check out include Feedblitz.com, Zookoda.com, and Squeet. FeedBurner offers its own email subscription service as well as provides built-in support for FeedBlitz and Squeet.

4. Comment on Other Blogs

Find other blogs that your target audience might read and comment on interesting blog posts. Entering a blog comment is easy. Most blogs have a link next to each post that you can click to open a comment page or dialog box. Adding insightful commentary or other useful information is far more helpful than just indicating that you like—or dislike—a specific post. By listing your name and the URL of your blog, people will check you out if they feel your comment adds value.

5. Ping for Attention

When you update your blog, use a ping utility to notify multiple blog update services that you have new blog content. Using a utility to notify multiple services, such as Technorati, My Yahoo!, Moreover, and Feedster, with a single entry is a big timesaver. Pinging helps to index your blog faster, which leads to greater search engine visibility. Some free ping utilities to consider include: King Ping, Pingoat, and Ping-O-Matic. If you use FeedBurner, you can also set up automatic blog pinging.

By trying one or more of these blog promotion techniques, you should start seeing an increase in your blog traffic. And by ensuring that all these new blog visitors learn about your book, an increase in book revenue should follow.

About the Author

Patrice-Anne Rutledge is the bestselling author of 25 books and a publishing and book promotion expert. To sign up for her ezine and receive a free special report on author websites, visit her site at www.websavvywriter.com.

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