eBookGuru.org

My all time favorite thing to do it go to my Ning groups.

• http://bookblogs.ning.com/
• http://romancereadersandwriters.ning.com/

It was here that I was able to find like-minded people. You know, those wonderful people that eat, sleep, and breathe romance books. I go into the groups and find a book blog, see if they have a contact link. If they do I might say, “Hi, My name is AJ Best and I was wondering if you do author interviews or guest blogs on your site? Because like Toby Keith says I Wanna Talk About Me!” The worst they can say to me is no. (Hopefully it’s not because they don’t like that song.) If they do, then I go to another blog and start the process over.

What will hopefully happen is a buzz will start. “Oh, some chick named AJ Best or something like that will be blogging with us sometime next week.”

Then it will build to, “OMG, AJ’s coming on Friday, I can’t wait, and let’s go tell Val!” Now let’s all hope that this is a good thing. We are trying to not scare away the readers here.

• http://groups.yahoo.com/ There are thousands of yahoo groups out there and they are varied in subject as well as in context. You can find local area writing groups, romance writing groups, sci-fi writing groups, … OK, so you get the point. And with most of these groups they have rules as to when you are permitted to promote your work. Make sure to read the rules and if they are not crystal clear and are only clear as mud, sit back and watch. See what the local yokels are up to and go with the flow. This will make sure that you aren’t stepping on any toes. There are many readers attached to these groups, so get in there and start promoting yourself and your work! If your publisher has faith in you, you should too.

• Going back to step #10 (Get Your Name Out) get your own blog, and blog consistently. You don’t have to always talk about writing and your books; you can talk about your real life. Believe it or not readers sometimes put writers up on a pedestal. They see you as “writers” and not real people. (Yeah, yeah, I hear ya!) So get on your blogs and show them your real side. (Hold on guys, maybe you don’t want to get that real!)

• Nine chances out of ten your publisher (if you’re published already) will have a blog of their own. Take advantage of the free publicity man, it doesn’t come around every day. Your publisher and their teamwork hard to get your name out there! Make sure to help them along in any way that you can. But remember, they are working with more than one author, so give them everything you possibly can. A wise man once told me (and seems he was told from Huey Lewis or Springsteen), “It’s better to have and not need, than to need and not have.” So give them a blog with cover art even though they created it, it saves them the trip. Give them your website, I know they have it on file, but that makes it one less thing for them to look up!

• Review sites are another GREAT source of free publicity. Most review sites that I am aware of will give a courtesy email to the author to say, “Hey, our site reviewed your book! Come check it out!” What they really want you to do is make a comment! Say thanks. Common courtesy goes a long way in the real world folks. And while you are thinking about the review site, hit the reply button and say, “Hi! Thanks so much for the review. I appreciate the time your reviewer took to review my book. I was wondering if your site did author interviews or guest blog posts. I am available any day that you may have available except for Sundays. Thanks in advance. AJ.” What’s the worst that they can say? NO? Guess what, you are only out a little bit of time if they say no and it’s well worth the effort to make that contact.

So get your tail out there and talk about yourself. Get out and let the world know who you are and what is going on in your life. Let them know the real you and the writer side of life as well. Get them hooked on you and your writing so when the next book comes out, they won’t be able to live without it. Stop back by next week where we will be talking about Gathering All Your Friends Around.

If you took the time to read Charlee’s article the other day, on building your E-Authors web site, then it’s very likely your on the road to getting set up with your own site. Today it’s time to talk about building traffic and getting noticed. In my experience the simplest way to do this (short of spending a pile of money on advertising) is to install a WordPress blog.

WordPress is a simple too that is easy to install on your site, quite easy to use once you know your way around, and even with that simplicity it is the best way to gain a readership quickly. One thing to note before we move on: I am referring to the WordPress software that can be found on http://www.wordpress.org, and not a free wordpress.com blog. You can actually build just as much traffic with the free blog that doesn’t require a web host, but then you wouldn’t be bringing that traffic to your author’s site.

Why Blogging Works

Before we talk about how to build traffic with a blog, let’s first discuss why it works for traffic building. There are actually a few reasons why a blog will work to build a fan base faster than a web site, some of them are obviously clear, and other’s you may not have known.

1. Blogs are more personal. With a blog you not only have a method to reach out to people but you also have a way of becoming a person and not just another author. More than than you have a way to build relationships (in a way) with your readers. According to the Technorati’s last State of the Blogosphere report, 67% of of bloggers have built relationships with people who they’ve never met in person through their blogs – that fact alone speaks for the personal nature of a blog.
2. Search engines love blogs. The blog on your site will get rated higher, and be updated more often than any other section of your web site. If you have a term that you want to be rated for (your name, your book titles, etc), all it takes is including those terms in the title of a post and you’ll gain search engine rankings quickly.
3. A blog gives you a connection to the world. Your web site is a static page. It’s there but people have to find it before anyone will ever see it. With a blog, you can post comments on one of the other 184 million blogs out their, and each comment includes a link back to your site. In other words you just gained a way to potentially put a link to your own site in front of the 346 million people who read blogs regularly.

Getting Started – Setting Up Your Blog

Since we’re covering traffic building I’m not going to go into technical detail on installing a blog. Wordpress.org has great documentation, if you need to learn the how of it. If your still confused you can always hire someone on Rent a Coder to install if for you (and it probably won’t cost you more than $50). With that said, you will need the Wordpress Software and you’ll also need the Wordpress.com com stats plugin.

Install both of those to your server. Generally you would create a new folder called blog, and install them there. This will allow you to have you new blog hosted at www.authorsdomain.com/blog/. To activate the Wordpress stats plugin, you will need to signup for a WordPress.com account. Be sure to link that account to the URL of your new blog (it will allow you to comment on other blogs and have the link back to your site).

Getting Noticed With a Blog

Now we get to the part you’ve been waiting for – the big secret to building traffic with a blog. This one really is a big secret so pay attention! To build traffic with a blog, all it takes is commenting on other blogs.

Update your blog 2 – 3 times per week and every time you post head over to Wordpress.com. Use “Right Now in Tags” section, on the right side of that page, to find a tag that is related to your site (I almost always comment on writing or book related blogs). With each post to your blog, take the time to comment on five to ten other blogs around the world of WordPress. With your Wordpress.com account being linked back to to your own blog, on your own site, every comment includes a link to your site.

If you take the time to do this something wondrous begins to happen.

First you’ll see immediate results from the owners and common readers of the blogs you comment on. The blog owner will click the link to see who you are before approving the comment, and regular readers will click the link to see who the new person is (popular blogs are like small communities). As time goes on, those links will bring you even more traffic. Other people find the blog post you commented on from other links, or through search engines, and they see your comment and will often click that link to.

The most important part of this whole traffic building method, besides ensuring you stick with it, is to actually get involved. Don’t just comment on someone’s blog for the sake of leaving a link. Read what they had to say and post a relevant comment – get involved, build relationships, make some friends, and have some fun! Soon not only will you find that you have hundreds of links back to your site as time goes on, but you’ll also meet real people who like you and your writing, and who are willing to promote your work as well.

This is the first of two posts I will be writing on promoting yourself with a blog. In the next article I will cover tools to take your blog to the next level. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you catch the next article, and also so you don’t miss Don’s upcoming series on email marketing.