If you’re an author in the process of establishing yourself as an industry expert, a blog is an essential platform for communicating new ideas, opinions, and commentary. I go into greater detail on this in the Blogging Best Practices series, but below are a few tips to get you started.

 

Creating a blog
Free sites such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer easy-to-set-up blog templates and hosting tools. However, if you’re seeking a blog with more professional features—including graphical/multimedia layouts, built-in SEO, a comprehensive widget library, and in-depth tracking stats—check out TypePad.com. TypePad has a low monthly fee, but it offers authors more options so they can scale blogs to meet evolving personal brand and business needs.

 

Frequency of posts
While you may not have the time to post content on a daily basis, try to post content on a weekly basis to provide timely and relevant information to readers. Additionally, creating a steady stream of fresh content gives search engines more text to index, which improves your rankings within Google and Yahoo. Blog posts and comments by visitors both count as new content.

 

Blog postings
It’s important that your blog provide value and information, not just serve as a promotional tool. Focus on sharing tips, strategies, news, events, reviews, and interviews with other important people in your genre. Be sure to allow opportunity for discussion and feedback to drive reader engagement.

 

Blog Basics

• User-friendly navigation. It should be easy for readers to find current posts, locate archived posts, and view posts about the same topic. Be sure to tag each of your posts with keywords central to the post’s subject matter, and create basic categories, or headings, under which recurring themes can be grouped.
• Get linked together. Publish a list of blogs that you follow. Then, you can reach out and request that those bloggers publish reciprocal links to your blog.
• Comment links. Spread the word about your blog by commenting on blogs that have a similar readership and including your blog’s link in the comment (but be sure you are adding value to the discussion, not just promoting your blog).
• Blog book tours. Consider a blog book tour. You can pursue coverage of your blog via other bloggers by arranging to be interviewed, offering free content, and requesting a book review. For additional details on blog book tours, check out BlogBookTours and BlogBookTourGuide.
• Links to your web presence. Always link to your author and book websites on the front page of your blog.
• Search engine indexing. Use a free service such as Ping-o-matic, which alerts different search engines about new content you’ve recently published on your blog and helps get your content indexed quicker.

Widgets
GetGlue's book widgets empower you to promote your book and brand across blogs, social networks, and the Web. Simply incorporate this widget into your website, and when someone hovers over your book title, a menu appears showing interested readers a preview of the book, where to purchase the book online, and an option to share the book across social networks.

 

There are many widgets you can incorporate for free into your blog if you’re using WordPress or TypePad. Check out those two platforms’ widgets here and here.

 

What are your best tips for authors who blog? 

 

Rochelle Carter is the President/CEO of Ellechor Publishing House. Ellechor is a publisher of Inspirational Christian books, including Adventure and Romantic fiction, and non-fiction/devotionals dealing with Relationships, Suicide Prevention and General Self-Help.

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