“About Blog Sites and The Benefits”

Some of us have taken our sweet old fashioned time about taking on new internet stuff and some of us have jumped right in there and are already really good at blogging. There appears to be no way around it. I gave in several months ago and after I figured out how to do it and got into looking at other blog sites, I found I really enjoy it. It must not be that difficult, you’re here, reading this right now.

Remember, people recognizing your name and liking your reputation as a writer is a critical part of being a successful author. Blogging is all about writing about…. You decide, find your niche and that’s the beauty of it. Its 20% sales pitch and 80% creative writing. Okay, maybe 20/60 with 20% dedicated to organizing and formatting and proofreading and blah blah blah. But still, 60% creative writing on something you have to do for marketing anyway is a win-win in my book!

Successful blogs are based on giving and not just a sales pitch. If you look at it as an opportunity to demonstrate your talent as a writer then you can turn a daily task that is necessary for marketing into a showcase and platform for your creativity and by doing so, accomplish a greater success in marketing than if you just send out self promoting tweets and Facebook updates. I made the mistake of not keeping the article to share here, but from a very good source, I read recently that, specific to authors and book sales, Twitter and Facebook and similar social platforms are the lowest performing marketing tools with the lowest rate of return while blogging is in the top 3! What’s the difference? Social platforms are flooded with self promotion sales pitches and missing the social connection that is needed to hook a buyer and blogging is a more natural forum for developing and cultivating those connections. Period. Think about it. If someone follows your blog, its because they enjoyed what you wrote and want to see more. If someone follows you on Twitter or Facebook, they are more than likely more interested in exchanging self promotion sales pitches and are more interested in their own followers than what you are saying. Which one is going to result in a sale sooner?

Once you understand the importance and benefit to blogging, now you have to figure out how to leverage that tool to get the most from it. If you are here, you are an author, that means you are a writer. Blogging should give you this:

Satisfaction as a platform for you to showcase your creativity and writing talents.
Build your reputation – your name needs to be recognized when people are shopping and attached with the thought, “I know that name, they write a great blog site, I want to read their book too!”
Promotion with as little time investment as possible

How do you accomplish those three things?

1 – Find your niche. Wikipedia defines:

Niche market, a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.
Niche blogging, a blog focused on a niche market (above)

Basically, define some part of your market that you are very proficient, successful and passionate about and write about it. Create Articles that you post on your blog. We’ll talk later about article marketing if this is something you enjoy doing…you’ll be able to reuse each article you write and post on your blog for lots of other opportunities to be noticed, quoted, talked about and reblogged as an author.

2 – Take the time to develop your blog to be visually appealing, use a credit line that is consistent and includes a link to your books sales page and give, don’t sell.

A great way to build your network, learn, increase your blog’s following and in general become more well known is to go looking for blogs that you enjoy reading. Like them, comment on them, follow them – this all directly impacts your enjoyment while increasing your popularity and making your name known.

3 – You are wasting your time with self promotion one liners. Plain and simple. What do you respond better to when presented with advertising? Link your blog site to your social media accounts so that when you publish a post goes to them and forget about it. Spend your time writing great content, following other blog sites that have content you like and relate to, comment, comment, comment on them and look for guest blogging opportunities where you can publish your content on someone else’s blog and have a credit line with a back link. You get more attention and results this way and you are getting FREE SEO out of it too. Back links are an incredibly easy and effective way to rank higher on search engines. (Here’s your AHA moment – you are reading an article that does everything the article is telling you about…I am writing about what I know and am good at and enjoying what I am doing and haven’t tried to sell you a thing but the click through rate on my credit line links are incredible! This site encourages guest posting, is based on content from authors for authors and requires credit lines and back links!)

You won’t see a whole long list of blog sites here, each person’s list is unique to that individual. Here are a few this author recommends:

http://www.thewriterssite.com/direct_pages/book_review_sites.html – this is just a site that lists a bunch of blogs that do book reviews. Its a good place to browse and see if you find anything that interests you.

http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/09/15/100-best-blogs-for-book-reviews/ – an interesting resource but a resource none the less, a list of sites that specializes in book reviews.

http://www.stepbystepselfpublishing.net/index.html – in my opinion this site is misnamed but it is an excellent resource for blogs that do book reviews and for you to go on that same list if you want to do book reviews on your blog…two birds with one proverbial stone!

www.dlhbookreviews.wordpress.com – this is actually my site and I started it so I could network with authors, read great books and help them out. It’s turned out to be a good site for you to submit your book for review and request an author interview…nothing else is on that site and it gets a lot of traffic. I also post the book reviews to Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and am willing to add to that list. Its also home to my unique Author Interviews – DLH

~~~~~~~~~~>Debra L Hartmann, Author, book reviewer, Host of the Talk Radio with NO Radio show at http://dlhbookreviews.wordpress.com and CEO and Editor http://www.theprobookeditor.com