Tag Archives: blog content

Marketing

Blog tours: Best practices for bloggers & authors

2 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours offer both bloggers and authors a chance to get out there, find new books to love, find a bigger audience. I’ve participated in a few blog tours for other authors. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years.

For bloggers

Be honest! While author-bloggers want to be loyal to fellow authors, we have to remember our blog readers are our real audience. If our blog readers go out and spend their money on a book we didn’t really enjoy but made to sound good, might that reflect poorly on us?

Be kind. To offset the above, just because you didn’t like a book doesn’t mean you should publicly rip on it. If you really, really hated it, I recommend contacting the author or blog tour coordinator first to let them know you don’t feel good about posting your feelings in public. I know of authors who’ve invited bloggers to post it anyway. You might focus on areas that you feel were strong and list other areas that needed improvement.

Link, link, link! You don’t have to list all the planned stops on the tour with links, but at the bare minimum, you should provide a clickable link to somewhere your readers can buy the book. Links to the author’s website and/or blog are awesome, too.

Remember your FTC disclosure: you received the book for free from the author/publisher, but that didn’t affect your opinion. In some cases, you might also need to disclose that it didn’t guarantee a review (such as newspapers, who receive free books to review all the time, but don’t guarantee a review just because you give them a free copy).

Make your blog post engaging! Just slapping the back cover copy on your blog only does so much to help to the author&madsh;or interest your blog readers! We’ll take a look at this in a little more depth in another week or two.

For authors

Be clear and communicative. Last week, Tristi Pinkston gave us some great advice on setting up a blog tour. Make sure you make your expectations clear from the get-go: tell the bloggers exactly what you’d like them to do. Offer gentle reminders about a week before a post is scheduled.

Be accommodating. Like Tristi said last week, provide an image of at least the book cover (an image of you would be helpful too!), as well as a clean, well-formatted copy of the back cover copy for them to cut and paste. If you can, offer your review copies in multiple formats: hardcover, Kindle, Nook, PDF, etc. And be sure to give them a direct link to somewhere their readers can purchase your book, to make things easy for them.

Cross promote, cross promote, cross promote! You do not want your blog devolving into a daily update of all the other places your book is being featured, but you definitely need to link to the reviews people are doing for you! If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page, sharing those reviews there would be great. (Look for an awesome quote to go with the link to help draw people in.)

Recognize that not everyone will love your book. It’s just a mathematical impossibility. The purpose of a blog tour is getting your book out there in front of a wider audience, and not everyone will love everything they read. It’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your writing or even your book. So let’s put down the flamethrower, okay?

Consider whether you want to comment publicly on the blog posts. I have friends who don’t because they feel that their presence might stifle the conversation on the blog, emailing their thanks instead. Others pop by to say thank you publicly. Others engage in a dialogue (friendly, I hope!) in the comments.

Be gracious. The bloggers on your tour are doing you a favor, even if they post a negative review. Say thank you. Stay humble. Make friends.

A successful blog tour generates more than just sales. You’re building readership and creating relationships. Keep that in mind no matter which side of the book you fall on.

What do you think? What have you learned from doing blog tours, as a blogger or an author?

Photo credits: On the platform, reading—Mo Riza; Thank you sign—Avard Woolaver

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Tracking your blog: Using Google Analytics

1 Comment
This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Marketing: blogging

If you’re serious about blogging, it’s important to focus on your visitors. How much do you really know about your visitors? Do you know where they come from? Why they came to your site? How long they stayed? How many pages they looked at? How many came and immediately left?

Last week we looked at a very basic solution for finding this web analytic information: Blogger or WordPress.com’s built-in stats packages. There are many free web analytics packages out there. In my opinion, Google Analytics offers the most comprehensive solution. It may be a little overwhelming for someone just starting out, but it’s really not hard to find the most important numbers you need to be keeping track of. Click on the picture at right to enlarge it to see a sample of some of the important, but easy to read, reports that Google Analytics generates.

Before you say, “Oh, numbers; I can’t deal with numbers!” or “Oh, coding; I can’t deal with coding!”, let me tell you that these numbers are good to know—and very useful in growing your blog readership. And let me tell you that these numbers are easy to find, use and understand with a free web analytics package (software installed on your site that tracks what visitors do on your site)—no coding, just cut and paste.

Here’s some of the information you can see in a single report, from one of my actual sites (not this one, though):

This report is the dashboard, a customizable overview of several reports. There are dozens of more in-depth reports available in Google Analytics, and even I only scratch the surface of this awesome web analytics program. I have a basic overview of how to install Google Analytics in my free PDF The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers. I originally wrote it in 2007, but updated it with newer, easier installation procedures today. Check it out!

Next week, we’ll take a look at some of my favorite reports, and how to put all this data to use.

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Tracking your blog: using Blogger or WordPress.com stats

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Marketing: blogging

One of the most important things you can do with your blog or website is to track it. You need to understand where your blog or site visitors are going on your site, what they’re reading, and what they like if you’re going to keep them coming back for more.

Free blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com include some basic blog stats, and that’s a good place to start. Next week we’ll look at a more thorough and flexible way of tracking your site, and then we’ll move on to what we should do with all this information.

Blogger

In Blogger, go to your blog and find “Stats” in the left-hand navigation. In the Overview, you’ll find info on your pageviews, audience map, top posts and referring sites. (Click on any image for a closer look!)

What are pageviews? Pageviews indicate the number of times a single page on your site—your About page, your main page, a blog post, etc.—is loaded on someone’s computer (including your own, unless you click on “Don’t track your own pageviews”; always a good idea). Your pageviews are probably higher than your visitor numbers, because most visitors will view more than one page on your site (we hope, anyway!).

Below the pageview information, you can find the Posts list, showing your post popular posts and how many views they have. Traffic Sources tells you what websites are sending you visitors, and Audience shows you where those visitors life. Each of these reports have their own pages, as well.

The Posts page gives you a longer list of your most popular posts, listed by most pageviews. This also includes the date and number of comments for your information, too. This is one of the two most important report pages you’ll want to focus on.

The other page to keep an eye on, the Traffic Sources page, shows you where your traffic is coming from. The Referring URLs report shows what exact web addresses are sending visitors to your blog. (If you see a blog post in there, click through and say thank you!) The Referring Sites report aggregates the data from the URLs report. For example, the URLs report will show each individual Google search URL, but the Sites report adds all the Google searches together to show how influential Google really is in people finding your site.

Scroll down further to find the Search Keywords report. This report tells you what words people are typing into search engines and ending up on your site. (It’s important to note that this report does not necessarily mean you rank well for those words, but tells you how many people arrive on your site after typing them in.)

Finally, you have the Audience page. This page gives you a little information about your visitors—what countries they come from, what web browser they use and what operating system their computer/phone runs on. This information is largely fun, but it’s important to remember to check your blog in the top browsers to be sure it displays well.

WordPress.com

Self-hosted WordPress doesn’t come with a stats package onboard (though you can certainly add one with a plugin), but WordPress.com features a stats report under the My Stats tab. The reports are largely the same kind: the top chart shows your traffic. Views by Country is like the audience report above. Top Posts & Pages is like the Posts report for Blogger. Referrers show sites that sent visitors to your site.

The Clicks report shows what links to pages off your blog visitors click from your site. Search Engine Terms is the Search Keywords report from above. Tags & Categories shows you what tags or categories on your posts are most popular with your visitors. It’s like the Top Posts & Pages report, but it aggregates those posts by their tag or category.

Finally, the Totals, Followers and Shares report shows you how many posts, comments, categories and tags you have, as well as your followers. The Shares sub-tab gives you a count of how many times your posts have been shared.

I wish I could give you more information and better examples here, but I don’t really use WordPress.com much (obviously) so I have no data to dig into.

What do you think? What do you see here you can use? We’ll talk more about a more in-depth tracking package next week, and then we’ll follow up with how to use this information!

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

So, seriously: should writers blog?

1 Comment
This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Marketing: blogging

If you’ve been hanging around the blogosphere for a while, you’ve probably heard arguments from every side about whether writers should blog. Yes! No! Maybe!

From the Yes! camp, we hear that writers who are seeking publication should be getting their name out there through a blog. Also, a blog is a great way to connect with future readers and other writers, possibly refine your voice, write every day and build your platform. And look! It doubles as a soap box!

From the No! crowd, the arguments are more diverse. Maybe you don’t have time to write and blog, or maybe your blog voice interferes with your fiction voice.

From the Maybe! crew, the stipulations usually relate to your blog topic: you should blog about X or Y, but never about writing, politics, religion, your family, the color yellow, peanut butter . . .
Continue reading So, seriously: should writers blog? →

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Website review: Sierra Gardner (sgardn.blogspot.com)–highlighting blog content

5 Comments

All right! A little behind schedule, we’re digging into the website reviews. Ted will get to the visual side of the reviews ASAP, but I want to get these reviews up even sooner than possible (ESTP?). And we’re starting with one of my fellow crusaders, Sierra Gardner!

Hi, Sierra! Since I’ve subscribed to your blog for almost four months now, I’m familiar with some of your great content already. Highlighting that content can be a challenge for all bloggers, but I can see you’re working very hard to do just that. We’ll also look at your future marketing efforts, since you’re not pursuing an agent or a book deal yet.

Content and navigation
I’m always happy to find an About page quickly and easily on a new blog. Your bio is cute and personable. You might consider using the sidebar widget version of “About Me” in addition to the page, so we get some idea of the face behind the blog without having to dig deeper.

Also, you might consider breaking contact me into a separate page. If I came to your blog to contact you, I might not think to look on the about page for that info—and if I did, I’d still have to scroll down to find it.

You’re working hard to highlight several types of content on your blog, and that’s great. You’ve got a page that lists writing samples you’ve shared as well as one for your favorite posts. Both of these are great ideas. You might be able to make these pages work even harder for you by sharing a short summary or synopsis of the post or sample to encourage clickthroughs. On your writing samples page, at the very least an indicator of the genre could help entice readers to click. The favorite posts page might also benefit from a sentence or two of description to hook your readers.

The Submissions page is a little bit confusing, especially on a writing blog since we’re used to seeing submissions on only agent and publisher sites. While the name is appropriate, a title like maybe Guest Posts & Questions might help, too. If you have any examples of either type of submissions, maybe list & link to them underneath.

You might also consider moving the followers widget higher to highlight that feature of your site and encourage people to follow your blog. Generally, the archive isn’t the best thing to have first in your sidebar—it doesn’t ask your readers to engage or take further action as effectively as subscribe buttons, a Followers widget, social media buttons or even your bio. Show your readers how to

Search engine visibility
On Google, your blog comes up third for your name. Your LinkedIn profile is fourth. There are a couple Facebook profiles, but they’re not yours. In Bing/Yahoo, your LinkedIn is first, but your blog doesn’t show up in the top 10 results—although your Blogger User Profile does. When you’re ready to begin the agent search, be sure to include your name prominently on your site, and get links using your name as the link back at your site (such as from guest posts). If possible, it might be good to move your blog to sierragardner.blogspot.com (or better yet use Blogger’s Custom Domain feature to put it at sierragardner.com, sierragardnerauthor.com or blog.sierragardnerauthor.com).

Optimizing for your name does post some challenges. There are a lot of people out there named Sierra Gardner or Sierra Gardener, and there’s even some competition from the Riverside, CA, community of Sierra Gardens. However, it doesn’t look like anyone is actively trying to rank in search engines for your name, so a little bit of effort could pay off quickly and well.

I’m sure you come across this pretty often, but it might be difficult for readers to remember how to spell your name. (NO, I’ve never had that problem. Sigh.) You might think about also optimizing for Sierra Gardener so your site ranks high when people search for your name spelled incorrectly.

Sierra, thanks for sharing your site with us and good luck in all your writing and blogging efforts!

What do you think? How can you highlight the content in your blog better?

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!