Guest Blogger: How To Make a Blog Tour Work Better

My special friend Yvonne Perry did an extensive blog tour for her new series of books for children The Sid Series. Of course I participated in it with this blog. In the process she sent out this letter to her some thirty particpants. I thought the ideas in it might be helpful to other authors planning a blog tour in the future. Here is is--with her permission, of course!

Dear Blog Tour Participants,

Here are some ideas on how to prepare for Yvonne's blog tour and raise your blog in the search engines. Please let me know your Twitter name and if it is okay to share your email address with the other participants on Yvonne's blog tour. [Editor's note: Isn't this a grand way to enlarge the benefit for all participants? That is to help them grow their Twitter list!]

Thank you for being part of my blog tour for The Sid Series. Here are some ways we can network to make certain the blog tour beneficial to all of you.

Prepare Your Blog for Guests

Search engines gravitate to active blogs, so be sure to post something on your blog at least three times per week. Ask a question at the end of your posts and invite the reader to leave a comment.

Whenever you visit a blog, leave a comment and a link to your blog. Search engines look for inbound and outbound links, so you are doing yourself and that blog owner a favor.

Use Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking sites to announce that you have added a new post on your blog. Give a teaser as to what the blog post is about. When using Twitter, you can shorten the URL using www.hootsuite.com or http://tinyurl.com to reduce the number of characters in your tweet. Long Web addresses in an e-mail or blog post can break across the page and lose functionality, so it's a good practice to shorten URLs before posting.

Network With the Blog Owners On My Tour

I would like your permission to share your email address and Twitter name with the hosts of my tour. By following and re-tweeting one another we can get our Tweets in front of an even wider audience.

Here is a link to the descriptions and dates of where I'll be stopping during my tour: http://tinyurl.com/SidTour. Let me know if your information on the list is incorrect and I'll fix it immediately.

You may notice that each stop is completely different. Each of you has received a unique article for your debut. You are welcome to create your own lead-in paragraph to announce that you are allowing me to post as a guest blogger.

I will personally stop by your blog on your assigned day and answer any questions people leave in your comments.

Please post your article as early in the day as possible (before 7 a.m.). If you don't want to get up that early, you can set the post (if you use Blogger.com) by selecting "post options" and changing the date when you set up the post. If you have questions about how to do that, I'll be glad to help you with this time saving feature.

As we get closer to the tour date, I will send some sample tweets and blog material that you can use to ramp up and prepare your blog for the tour stop.

I really appreciate your support and look forward to networking with you.

Yvonne Perry
http://TheSidSeries.com
http://www.writersinthesky.com

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Yvonne Perry is a freelance writer and editor, award-winning Amazon.com bestselling author, podcast host, blogger extraordinaire, newsletter publisher, Internet marketing guru, and the author of The Sid Series ~ A Collection of Holistic Stories for Children. http://TheSidSeries.com. She is a graduate of American Institute of Holistic Theology where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Metaphysics.
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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 two how to books for writers, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Her FRUGAL book for retailers is 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. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". 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 blog.