Even if a publishing company is printing the books you write, you’ll always be doing a certain amount of marketing on your own, or at least you should be. One of the ways to market a book, as well as your brand as an author, is to create and maintain a blog. Nowadays, there are many ways to monetize blogs, which makes them a possible means of income.
Hosting a blog is an easy way to reach out to your target audience in a personal way. You can choose to enable commenting on your blog posts, which is an invitation for readers to share their thoughts. There are also many ways to market a book on a blog, including sharing a direct purchase link in a sidebar. If you’re going to blog, however, you’ll want to enhance your blog as much as possible to boost engagement, and there are several things you can do to accomplish this.
Enhance your author blog by offering multi-access options to each post
Blogs are basically a form of online journal or magazine. However, if boosting engagement is one of your primary goals, you might consider offering additional ways to access your content, such as including options for video and audio versions of each post.
This allows guests to listen to your posts while they’re taking a walk or going for a run, etc., or to watch videos of interviews or of you, discussing a particular blog post topic. Offering multi-access options to your blog posts covers all the bases. This way, people can read, watch or listen to your blog entries.
Always optimize SEO, which begins with research
You can’t boost engagement on a blog if people don’t even know it exists. A key to blogging success is search engine optimization (SEO). When planning content for your blog, it’s important to thoroughly research keywords, trending topics or articles and related queries. Who is your audience? What are they searching for online?
Once you have determined answers to these questions, you can target a specific audience by adapting the voice, tone and phrasing of your blog posts to align with a particular audience personality.
Make sure you are providing a lot of free information and resources
If your author blog is nothing but one big commercial for your book, you aren’t likely going to develop a loyal follower base. Sure, guests might make an initial visit and may even buy your book, but they probably won’t make return visits if there isn’t a variety of content to attract their attention and keep them engaged.
To enhance your author blog, always make sure that you are offering your audience free information, resources and entertainment. For instance, you might create an e-pamphlet that includes tips for beginning writers and offer it free of charge via link in your sidebar. You can also achieve this goal directly through the posts you offer, making sure to write about a variety of topics that are of interest to your target audience.
Use top 10 lists to your advantage
Extending your blog beyond your own books is another way to boost engagement. After all, you don’t expect readers to go through life never reading material from authors other than you. Special feature posts, including top 10 lists, are fun to read and also help with SEO. You can create lists for top-selling novels in your genre, as well as topics, such as ”most prolific authors of all time” or ”books that have been banned from schools.”
Establish brand consistency and connection across multiple platforms
Brand consistency helps you and your writing become easily recognizable to your audience. For example, if you are active on numerous social media platforms (as you should be) consider using the same profile image across the board. Also, remember to connect your blog to your social media pages, either by using a system that enables automatic uploads or by mentioning specific blog posts (with links provided) in your interactions on social media.
And remember, if you do not have the time, skill or desire to maintain a blog but would like to have one because you understand its value regarding audience engagement, you can hire professional copywriters to write posts for you!
