Blog Expert Gives Three Reasons Why Authors Should Blog

This post is part of Nina Amir’s Blog Tour for
the revised edition of How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition. Help her celelbrate!

Follow the entire tour here: http://howtoblogabook.com/the-book/how-to-blog-a-book-revised-and-expanded-edition-blog-tour/

 

Three Reasons All Types of Authors Need to Blog

By Nina Amir

Lot’s of so-called experts say blogs are dead. They support their belief with the claim that too many blogs exist, the Internet is too noisy and it is too hard for anyone ever to find your site.

You’d like to believe them because you’d rather be writing your book than blogging. In fact, you’d rather be writing than doing any book promotion or platform building.

But those experts are wrong.

Blogs are alive and well. Not only that, they provide authors with one of the most effective tools available today for everything from building author platform, promoting books upon launch, building a brand, and writing books.

Here are three reasons you need to blog if you want to become a successful author—whether you write fiction or nonfiction:

1. You can Blog Your Way to Successful Book Promotion

All authors need author platform. (Yes, novelists need a platform, too.) An author platform is a built-in readership for the book you plan to publish. Without a platform, you have no one to whom to market your book upon launch—no fans on an email or subscriber list and no followers on social networks. Without platform, you lack visibility, reach, authority, and influence—parts of your platform—to help you promote your book.

Blogging remedies that problem.

If you blog consistently, often, and in a focused manner on one or two topics, you will gain visibility for yourself and your book. Search engines, like Google, catalog your posts for keywords or search terms. Over time, if you continue writing about the same subjects, this drives your site up in the search engine results pages, providing visibility. Your site—and your books—become discoverable by those searching on the Internet for your topic.

Plus, each time you publish a post, you share the link on social networks. This activity attracts followers on those networks and drives readers to your blog, where they sign up for your mailing list and subscribe to receive posts directly in their email boxes. Your new raving fans share your posts with their followers, which gives you reach and authority. Over time, as your following and engagement grow, you’ll become an influencer in your field. Then, when you ask people to purchase your newly released book, they will.

In other words, as you blog and share your posts on social networks, you build your author platform. Without a platform, it’s difficult to promote your book. With one, you can accomplish your book marketing effectively—often with the help of your blog.

2. You can Blog Your Way to an Awesome Author Brand

Branding provides a wonderful way to get yourself and your books noticed. Like Nike, Audi, Levis, or Lays Potato Chips, when someone says your name, sees your logo or thinks of one of your products (books), you want them immediately to know what you, as a writer, do or stand for. How do you accomplish this branding? With a blog.

Your blog serves as your author website. First, you use it to convey your message—how you want to be known by your potential readers (or customers and clients) and what message you want to convey. Do this with the name of the site (URL), the tagline you use, the colors you choose, and the content you produce on the blog. 

You have about five seconds to capture a visitor’s attention when they land on your website. That’s why branding is so important. If visitors leave, they don’t return. If they stay long enough, they might discover your books, especially if you have them prominently featured on your site.

And each blog post you write strengthens your brand if you share it across your social networks. (Don’t forget to brand each social network, so it looks like your website.)

3. You can Blog Your Way to a Book—or Many Books

Many writers don’t want to blog because the activity takes them away from their primary writing activity: producing a book manuscript. However, you can write your book right on your blog—post by post.

For nonfiction writers, this strategy makes a ton of sense. Write a 10-to-30-post series and turn it into an e-book. (Do this several times per year!) Or write a full-length book over the course of six months or so.

You also can repurpose existing blog content into a book. That’s the easy way to produce a book from your blog if you’ve been blogging for a long time or write blog series.

As you intentionally blog books, you develop an avid fan-base of readers (platform) ready to purchase the finished book. Each time you share the posts from your blogged book, you promote that book as well. You market without doing anything other than what you would normally do as a blogger. When you finish writing that first draft of your book and publishing it on your blog, you can edit, revise, add a bit of new content, and then publish!

With one blog, you can accomplish many tasks and become a highly productive and successful author. I could list more reasons to blog, but hopefully these three inspire you to not only write but blog.

To learn more about blogging book and booking blogs, purchase a copy of How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition in the Writer’s Digest Shop or at http://bit.ly/NinasHowTo .

 

About the Author

Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, is the bestselling author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual. A speaker, blogger, and author, book, blog-to-book, and high-performance coach, she helps people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and positively and meaningfully impact the world as writers, bloggers, authorpreneurs, and blogpreneurs. Some of Nina’s clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She is the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month, National Book Blogging Month, and the Nonfiction Writers’ University. As a hybrid author, she has published 15 books and had as many as four books on an Amazon Top 100 list at the same time.

To find out more about Nina and get a free goal-achievement e-book, visit www.ninaamir.com. Receive a set of free blog-plan templates when you visit www.howtoblogabook.com or a free guide to writing a nonfiction book at www.writenonfictionnow.com.

Follow Nina on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NinaAmir  
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninaamir 
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Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NinaAmir/posts 

Summary of Book

Transform Your Blog into a Book!The world of blogging changes rapidly, but it remains one of the most efficient ways to share your work with an eager audience. In fact, you can purposefully hone your blog contentinto a uniquely positioned book--one that agents and publishers will want to acquire or that you can self-publish successfully.

"How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition" is a completely updated guide to writing and publishing a saleable book based on a blog. Expert author and blogger Nina Amir guides you through the process of developing targeted blog content that increases your chances of attracting a publisher and maximizing your visibility and authority as an author.

In this revised edition you'll find:

• The latest information on how to set up, maintain, and optimize a blog
• Steps for writing a book easily using blog posts
• Advice for crafting effective, compelling blog posts
• Tips on gaining visibility and promoting your work both online and off
• Current tools for driving traffic to your blog
• Strategies for monetizing your existing blog content as a book or other products
• Profiles of bloggers who received blog-to-book deals and four new "blogged-book" success
  stories

Whether you're a seasoned blogger or have never blogged before, "How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition" offers a fun, effective way to write, publish, and promote your book, one post at a time.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The multi award-winning second edition of The Frugal Editor; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .