Using a Blog to Market Your Book

There are millions of bloggers around the world. They all have individual opinions and niche blogs they write for. This is one of the most well used forms of publicity. It is smart to use this medium as an avenue to advertise for your book.

Even after your book has been released, you can use blogging to get the word out for your book. Authors many times use blogs as a means of sharing with potential readers. Some even choose to use this form in lieu of traditional websites. Blogs can be set up to mimic websites and are useful in marketing.

One use of blogs in the marketing process is to announce dates of book related activities. You can write daily on your blog. Most bloggers have some following. This could be a small number of readers, or up to hundreds. Readers tend to pass on information to others. This will allow you to have even more potential traffic.

After your book has been released, you can still use your blog to market. You can write specific information about you book or related to your book in your daily or weekly posts. I also recommend posting information that would be helpful to your potential reader even if unrelated to your book. Example: If you are a children’s author, post some parenting tips. This will allow you to advertise your book and dialogue with potential readers. Fans are created through building a personal connection. What better way to help this process along than to use a blog?

Blogs allow readers to comment about individual posts written by the author. Through this technique people communicate with each other. This communication eventually encourages a following for the author.

Some use their blog to express their individual opinions on literary issues. When readers like your writing, they are more likely to want to know more about you personally. Blogging allows visitors to discover all sorts of things about authors. They also become aware of their new and future projects.

You can generate traffic to your blog by using social networking platforms that allow you to post updates. I use Hootsuite.com because, in addition to many features that would be a post of its own, it allows me to update all of my SNPs with one interface. I schedule the release of posts to occur throughout the day and use links to posts to answer people’s questions on twitter.

Blog tours have become another creative method of marketing books. There are a number of ways to perform a blog tour. Typically bloggers agree to host information about specific authors and their work. This is especially useful when new books are released. This group of bloggers will provide author bio information and links to their sites.

When multiple bloggers participate in a blog tour there may be potentially hundreds if not thousands of readers. Since each blogger has his or her following, this is compounded when there are many participants. With each set of followers, an author will have the opportunity to get publicity for their book.

If even a small percentage of the followers visit the author’s website, the tour will have been successful. This is ultimately true when the visitors turn into customers. Just like a regular book tour a blog tour is beneficial when sales are created.