CHAPTER 2

Blog to Build Your Readership Community

IT WAS IN 2006 that we really began to feel the change in the publishing industry brought on by individual empowerment in the digital age. First the music business radically changed, starting with music downloads; and then the movie industry, starting with streaming video; and then publishing, starting with ebooks. Global business was shifting on its axis. It was in 2006 that Time magazine awarded the Person of the Year Award to “YOU” instead of to a single person as in the past. Lev Grossman’s article in Time on December 25, 2006, said, “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter…. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

The world has become sufficiently tech-connected to enable us to interact, collaborate with, and create a community around our interest with a global crowd. Marketing specialists consistently encourage bloggers to rise above this noise level, but what a discouraging concept! Imagine moving into the midst of a huge crowd and being told you must rise above it. How can you create a blog with sufficient pull among the 156 million+ blogs published on the web today?

• Tumblr has more than 101.7 million blogs with 44.6 billion blog posts
• WordPress.com has more than 63 million blogs
• LiveJournal reports having 62.6 million blogs
• Weebly states it has more than 12 million blogs
• Blogster has more than 582,754 blogs

Since the rise of blogging in the late 1990s, bloggers have discovered time and again that certain elements enable their blogs to successfully stand out from the crowd, and we share those elements with you here. This chapter shows how to draw your audience into your specialization in your genre, your unique value, and your subject matter expertise through blogging and outlines efficient strategies and best practices that will get you to your online community quickly and efficiently.

Your Blog Is About More Than Content

A blog is by definition a web log or web journal, but it’s much more than that. A blog is your own instant publishing platform; your blog entries accumulate to form a body of journalism. When you attract and form an online community, they begin to interact with you and each other, which grows your book audience. Use blogging wisely to publish well, and you will find an audience ready and waiting for your book.

Your blog is your self-published online magazine, where you are the editor, writer, and publisher. Your blog’s built-in powerful tool is comment-enabled social networking. Your blog showcases you, displaying your subject matter expertise, personal interests, and thoughts behind the scenes of your book(s). And here’s the most powerful part: Once your blog readership numbers increase, it begins to exert an invisible pull of its own that attracts those who you didn’t contact or expect to contact, but who are out there searching for you and the help, advice, and value add that you offer. The more effort you put into your blog up front, the stronger your blog’s momentum will be and the less effort you’ll have to put into it later on.

Your blog’s drawing power contributes not only to your book’s success but also to your overall success as an author. Authors can’t see their whole readership, but they need to remember that a good-sized segment of the audience reading an online web journal includes media talent scouts in search of content, speakers, and more.

To mobilize the crowded web to work for you and to increase your book audience, first and foremost, direct your blog to the interests of your readers. Once readers see their needs and interests met, they feel a connection and take interest in you and then the best possible next step takes place: sharing this interest with their friends. This expands your readers’ networks to add to your own. In addition, as journalists, radio and television talent scouts, literary agents, and publishing editors all hunt for subject matter experts with a large audience, we add our networks to yours. Start tapping into the networks of each individual who finds and likes your blog. What grows your blogging audience is not so much a special cleverness, an ability to sell yourself, or having special marketing tricks; it’s how you maximize connections with others, showing authenticity, sincerely caring for and responding to your audience, and delivering to their needs.

At our literary agency, we scour the web daily to find authors who are subject matter experts and have a large following. Is that you? Can we find you? The same questions apply to fiction authors: if you are not findable, you will not be contacted by media scouts. As agents, we’re hit with tough requirements in presenting authors to publishers, such as how many followers and readers the author has, what the author platform presence includes, where and how the author shows up in person, the possibility of video or audio, and how many followers they have in each venue. The reason publishers ask us to find writers who have an established audience applies equally to self-published authors: It’s purely business. The larger the established audience, the better it’s ensured that when the book is published, there will be buyers.

Authors expand readership by consistently increasing their own presence through blogs, then showing up in comments and contributions on others’ networks. When I find you, a potential author to present to a publisher, I expand your audience by plugging you into our agency following, and then with the publisher who has their own following, and then with the bookstore buyers who have large book buyer databases. By starting a blog, you automatically begin to expand your reach by tapping into the reach of others; by commenting on others’ blogs and exchanging guest blog posts, you expand your reach even further.

Blogging Is Beyond an Advantage, It’s Essential

Recent surveys of book blog readers indicate that over half of all buyers buy books primarily based on the influence of the authors’ blogs! Consider the power of doubling your own audience, that is, those who pay attention to author web journals, by connecting to who you are, your behind-the-scenes thoughts and preferences, what you think and feel, why you’re a writer or subject matter expert, and the value add you are bringing to them. A major advantage to your blog, then, is the sheer fact of writing it, giving the inside scoop on you as the leading force of your book and opening the door to dialogue through comment boxes.

It’s a fact that businesses that blog get more web visitors and interest than businesses that don’t. Blogs create a loyal community of users that leads to higher sales, and businesses with blogs attain 20% more business than businesses that do not.

Blog Strategy

Once you’ve created your author website as described in Chapter 1, the most important task facing you is defining your blogging strategy and execution. Your author blog, created well, is the single best promotion avenue to supercharge sales of your books.

In the first decade of my publishing career as an editor for two major publishing houses, I believed that idea is king and that every move should be predicated on just the integrity of ideas. It took more than a decade for the reality of the book industry to catch up with my awareness; publishing is an industry that creates a product like any other business. This was a blow to realize, and I have seen authors with great ideas get shocked that their book did not get published, or that once published, did not become an instant top seller! I’m hoping this awareness will boost your own author career: A book is merchandise in the form of bound pages and a glossy cover, with a price tag, and must sell in large quantities to be successful.

Your author blog jump-starts the proving ground: that is, the existence of your readership community; the readers who comment who are likely to buy your book and tell their friends about how great your book is; and the potential numbers in your expanded network of those who will buy your book. And just as a crowded restaurant looks more attractive than an empty one, community starts taking off on its own once it reaches a threshold size. In today’s chaotic publishing climate, with increasing numbers of books being traditionally published and self-published, authors must attract a community, and maintaining a blog creates an important place to do it.

Here’s a basic all-purpose author blog strategy to get started:

1. Start your hosted blog, following the steps in this chapter.
2. Choose a blog type from the list in the next section to suit your subject matter interest and expertise.
3. Commit to a blog schedule and stick to it. Do not stop. Daily blogging is excellent, but twice or even once a week is fine as long as you are consistent.
4. Encourage comments and respond to every single comment and question, the same day if you can. For us, our morning coffee is the optimum time for audience interaction.
5. Ask guest bloggers for added posts and become a guest blogger for others.
6. Promote your blog. Link your blog to every personal and web presence you have: sites, social networks, training, speaking, etc. Post your blog URL on your business card and in your email signature line.

Blog Types

There is a tremendous freedom in blogging in that you make every decision about what you want to blog about and you can use any format under the sun. That said, tremendous freedom can and does bring tremendous chaos. Create a method of organizing your blog and your blogging at the outset. Just as chapters organize a book, posts organize your blog and present best in a format similar to consecutive articles in a published journal. Whatever method you choose, be consistent with your formatting and the level of your interactivity.

Three types of blogs are used by most of our author clients or are used in combination:

Blog as “DVD extras.” Movie DVDs carry a lot of extras: outtakes, directors’ cuts, deleted scenes, that is, everything behind the scenes. The same goes for author blogs: Many of our author clients use this leading blog format to keep audience interest. The very successful blog by Waterside author David Meerman Scott can be found at webinknow.com. David’s blog, titled Web Ink Now, is ranked in AdAge Power 150 as one of the top marketing blogs, a combination of topics that his readers are interested in that does not directly promote his book. Waterside client Bill Evans also uses the DVD extra–type format for his blog at billevansbanjo.com/blog. Note that both of these blogs speak to audience interests in an interesting, consistent, and short format with accompanying visuals.

For fiction authors, the outtake is a great format for behind-the-scenes looks at the books and movies you like with accompanying reviews, information about your characters, plots, locations, and themes of your books. Or print a segment of your book on your blog and add comments along the lines of directors’ cuts on DVDs. Mine your own database for original sources of writing you’ve done to post in your blog: letters, diaries, random observations, poems, or travel observations.

Blog as Question & Answer Forum. This format is the definite winner in terms of blog type, used by successful authors, in nonfiction and also in fiction. The Q&A format can be used not only to teach how-to’s and skills but also has the benefit of reaching behind the scenes for readers to ask and find out the inspiration for a story, how the writing process works, what inspires a writer, etc. The Q&A format is a tool with major practical advantages for authors, including:

• Simplicity
• Ease of plugging in content generated by others in the form of questions, which leads to cooperative networking
• Built-in audience interaction
• Helping and giving deeper insight to others
• Establishing subject matter expertise, depth, and added dimension
• Consistently refreshed and 100% tailored content that improves search engine optimization (SEO) and, best of all, draws returning customers to find out what the next Q&A dialogue will be

Successful Q&A blogs are found all over the web and used by many of our successful Waterside authors, including Andy Rathbone (andyrathbone.com), who uses this format to respond to issues his audience encounters, and Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor.com), whose Q&A is the centerpiece of his author site’s landing page.

A number of Waterside author clients write fiction as well as nonfiction, and these same techniques cross over to the world of fiction author visibility also. Fiction writers can check out Tee Morris’ blog at teemorris.com, who writes science fiction, steampunk, and fantasy.

Collective blogs. Use power in numbers: authors with like interests have formed collective blogs, where various authors contribute to posting. Contributing to a collective site, authors are able to increase the size of their following by posting to their collective networks. This type of blog is fully loaded with content and is an announcement platform for upcoming dates, lectures, book releases, and schedules. One example is our author client Winslow Yerxa, who blogs at the collective site harmonicasessions.com.

Encourage Online Sharing with Your Blog

In their second edition of Blogging to Drive Business, author clients Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt show how to foster your readership community through online sharing in your blog, suggesting that readers can have a sense of ownership within your blog space. Rebecca’s blog (rebeccacoleman.ca) creates a sense of community by addressing customer interests stated in comments. The blog advantage is interactive content, so encourage a strong community to form around your posts. “In some cases Internet users will create groups, fan pages, or their own blogs dedicated to various products or services they like,” Rebecca says. “Opening up similar access and playgrounds for discussion in your own online space can work to your advantage … the community might not necessarily be an actual page, forum, or comments section, but you’ll find that your readers will become your blog’s evangelists.”

Encourage blog conversation starting with reading comments, respond to them in a way that continues the conversation beyond, and then allow and encourage readers to share your content with their own social networks. Ask what they think and what their communities think about an issue to solicit comments. Here are more blog sharing tips from Rebecca and Eric’s book:

• To ensure tools are available, provide links and Share This buttons on your blog posts by using a service like AddThis. You can encourage readers to share your link through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit and through Facebook.
• Use a plugin from Twitter such as Tweetmeme to abbreviate links for tweets.
• When readers share your content on their blogs, they can just link back to your post; you can make that link visible from your site.
• Remember that blogging is about public sharing that builds your author brand! Whenever your posts are shared, you win as the exposure for your author brand and your book increases along with your ability to be found.

Start with a Hosted Blog

In the last chapter, we told you why you need to have a home base on the web, a site to serve as the magnet for all your writing endeavors. When you’re just starting out, maybe you want to test the waters a little bit. See some proof of what we’re talking about without going to the trouble (and expense) of finding a web host and registering a domain. In this case, often the best solution is to set up a blog on a hosted site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress.com. These are places where you can publish articles every day at no cost to you. The advantage of these particular sites for writers is not just the simplicity of setup and maintenance, but also the ability to reach many people through the communities around the platform.

There are many places on the web that will host your blog site, but we recommend choosing one of the big players: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, or WordPress.com. Where you choose to place your blog is largely a matter of personal preference. These sites will all help you find your audience through SEO and an existing community of bloggers. They are easy to set up and maintain. All of them have mobile apps that allow you to connect to your blog and post from a smartphone or tablet. Perhaps the availability of your preferred address on a particular host will be a deciding factor.

In this section, we’ll show you the defining characteristics of three platforms: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, and WordPress.

BLOGGER/BLOGSPOT

The idea behind Blogger is to give anyone a drop-dead simple way to have a blog. All the software you need to create and maintain a blog exists in your web browser, and you don’t have to install a thing. This has been true from Blogger’s beginnings as an independent website right around the dawn of the 21st century, through its acquisition by Google, straight through to today. It is also one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web.

Because Google owns Blogger, you can easily get yourself a Blogger account with your existing Google account. Blogger integration with other Google properties like YouTube and Google+ also offers several advantages:

• Linking to YouTube videos in your posts is a snap! In the post editor, you can search for relevant videos or link to your YouTube channel.
• You can automatically create a Google+ page for your blog that will share your posts with that audience, offering another way to interact with your readers.
• Perhaps most importantly, you can use Google AdSense and include affiliate links to earn money with your blog.

The downside to Blogger is mostly about control. Unlike WordPress and Movable Type/TypePad, you can’t run Blogger as the blog page of your own site. You can link your existing domain to your Blogger site, but you should only do this if your site is just a blog. If, for example, you want to directly sell ebooks or other content, you can’t do that on Blogger, though you can post affiliate links from other e-commerce sites.

If you like having lots of choices for how your blog will look, you’ll find Blogger theme options quite limited, especially compared to WordPress.com. If you’re one of those folks who complains about too many choices, however, choosing from the seven basic choices (with different color schemes) could be quite pleasant.

TYPEPAD

Whereas Blogger is for folks who just want to blog, TypePad from SAY Media is a specialized site host and content management system. It has been around a long time, and though it hasn’t gotten the same media attention as its rivals in recent years, it’s still among the top 500 trafficked websites.

TypePad’s big brother, Movable Type (MT), was one of the first industrial-strength blogging platforms, starting right around the same time as Blogger. A few months after Google bought the company that created Blogger, the MT developers (called Six Apart) ended the practice of distributing MT for free. The hosted version started in 2003 and has always been a paid, commercial product. When noncommercial bloggers who still had to install MT and connect it to a database (no easy task in those days) had to start paying a fee to run MT, many fled to the upstart WordPress. Eventually, Movable Type 4 was released as open source software. Today you can install Movable Type on a server for free; TypePad costs around US$100 annually.

WORDPRESS

We don’t have to tell you about the power of Blogger’s connection with Google. What may surprise you is the reach of WordPress—more than three-quarters of all blogs on the web run on WordPress (either self-hosted or at WordPress.com)! WordPress is among the top 25 sites in terms of traffic.

You can use WordPress either on your own web space (using a hosting company as described in Chapter 1) or on WordPress.com. Sometimes you’ll hear WordPress veterans talk about “self-hosted WordPress sites” or “WordPress-dot-org sites” to refer to WordPress running on a server. Self-hosted WordPress is typically updated with new features twice a year, with occasional smaller updates that are usually focused on plugging security holes. Depending on your hosting company, you may be responsible for keeping your site updated. The bigger hosts (and WordPress.com) handle this for you.

If you’re serious about blogging, and really do want to try out blogging on a hosted system before creating your own website, we highly recommend starting out at WordPress.com.

Consider these advantages:

• Large and strong community of users and developers.
• Excellent technical support.
• More than 100 free theme choices (and more than a handful of premium themes). When you choose a self-hosted location, hundreds of free and premium themes become available.
• An easy way to determine how your audience is building through detailed statistics.
• Freshly Pressed on the WordPress.com home page highlights dozens of posts every day, giving you the chance to shine.
• Simple export of your dot-com site to a self-hosted WordPress site (even porting your audience to the new site for a small fee). WordPress can usually import posts from another blog system, too.
• WordPress.com users often get to see and work with new features before they are released to self-hosted users.

How to Create a Blog

Regardless of what vendor you choose, you will have to think about these things:

• What to name your blog.
• What address (uniform resource locator, or URL) to use to help people find your blog.
• Writing your About page.

Naming Your Blog

A few things to think about when naming your blog:

• Most likely, the title should reflect the primary topic(s) you expect to cover in the blog.
• Use a pithy title! Both Blogger and WordPress allow a subtitle or tagline that allows for more expansive explanations of your blog.
• If you are expecting to create a separate site for your book (see Chapter 11), avoid giving your author website blog the same title.
• Don’t just toss off a title! Give it some thought, unless you plan to make the blog private while you work out your topic schedule and other details. While you can nearly always change the title of your blog, this is part of your brand. Often the title will also be reflected in your web address (which you can’t change).

Defining Your Web Address

Consider these facts:

• Every site on the web has a unique, specific address.
• WordPress is the only vendor that talks about its size; they say about 100,000 new blogs are created every day.

The reality is that whoever you choose to host your blog, millions of blogs are already registered on your chosen site, so finding your unique address can be tricky. Always check first for your blog’s title (or some shortened version). If you’re focusing on a particular topic, look for an address that people interested in that topic might search for. You may want to start with your name, if it’s not especially common. Have some backup ideas ready. You’ll learn right away whether the address is available.

Creating Your About Page

No matter what topics you explore, your blog should always reflect your personality. Every blog vendor lets you create a static page that allows readers to find out what your blog is about. Often the first thing a reader does after finding an interesting blog post is check the About page to see if the blog is worth following or subscribing to. This makes your About page critical in finding and building your audience.

Use the About page to describe what prompted you to start the blog, the topics you cover, and as much as you want to reveal about yourself. Remember that you’re making a first impression, so imagine what your reader wants to know about the person behind the words.

Now that you are set up with your blog, the next step is posting blog entries consistently all the way to your book’s publication.

Best Practices

Start now: Timing is a critical element of your blog, so start your blog well before your book publishes, as ongoing buildup promotion is essential. Blog to jump-start the success of your book, as you’re putting a hook into the pond of multimillions of web searchers who want to connect with you.

Look for model blogs: Before you create your blog, spend time reviewing possible models for your blog. When you see what’s already working out there in the crowd for existing authors, you can create your own style based on those successes. Perhaps you’ve already identified the popular blogs in your niche. If you haven’t, here are some examples of blogs that show author brand, personal touch, audience-interest-driven posts, and clear format:

• Tricia Goyer (triciagoyer.com/blog)
• Mary DeMuth (marydemuth.com/blog)
• Thom Hartman (thomhartmann.com/thom/blog)

Additional examples of preferred author blogs can be found at internet writingjournal.com/authorblogs.

Choose a template: Choose a format close to your favorite model blog and then customize it from there to save time. Review the different formats at blogsrater.com and technorati.com.

Choose a theme: Themes (aka templates) define the look and feel of your site. They take some of the pain out of choosing a color scheme, display font, and column size that can easily paralyze the average non-design-oriented writer. How you choose your theme differs depending on the site, but you can usually get a snapshot or preview of how your site would look with each theme applied. Click the picture you like best, and voilà! Your site will look like that.

This is where you can change your mind most often. Theoretically, you could change your site’s theme daily (even hourly, but don’t plant that in your brain), but that would drive away readers who come to expect that blog content is updated frequently, but that your style remains consistent.

While each blog host offers different choices for its themes, focus on these areas:

• Number of columns: One-column templates focus all the attention on your writing. Great for personal journals, not so great for building a community. A sidebar column with pointers to other areas of your site allows readers to navigate better, view the types of topics you cover, and perhaps see other sites that you visit (a “blogroll”). Add a second sidebar column for symmetry if you have a lot of sidebar content.
• Column width: You can usually specify a fixed width for each column. Often you can choose a “flexible” width that depends on your reader’s screen size.
• Colors: As a writer, you want to make sure your content is readable, so choose your background colors and fonts accordingly.

Writing Blog Posts

We operate in a new paradigm of web-based promotion that requires thinking and communicating not from your own perspective, but from the perspective of your audience. This is a new community era that does not take well to selling. Instead, communities want everyone to share great things with them. It means joining your audience community, paying attention to and responding to comments, and giving solid valuable information instead of advertising. What does your audience want? What motivates your readers? What are their hopes, dreams, and needs? The more you know the answers to these questions, take them into consideration, and deliver solutions, the more you will build audience for your writing.

With valuable content presented in the way that buyers can connect to, they will be naturally drawn to your books. Remember, top publishers have always understood that audience definition is key to creating the success of any book.

Your first blog post is best created as an introduction to yourself in a Welcome post. Shake hands, tell folks what you’re doing, and show that you are sharing and searching for friends with similar interests. Because the content of your blog is by its nature personal, readers want to see a flavor of the real person in the author.

Your blog post impact is a combination of content and presentation, so use these elements in each blog post:

• Strong headline: Use a great title and first sentence with SEO keyword tags.
• Date of post: This is typically added automatically by your blog system.
• Blog post text: Content ideas below. Shorter posts have become the norm, but maximum length is one short, edited intro paragraph, two or three body paragraphs, and one final short sentence, with second level subheads. Leave the last sentence as an “open for discussion” feel to attract the crowd, such as a question, a vote, or a request to comment.
• Visuals are important: Be sure to include photos in your blog. Images of 200 × 200 pixels are best for sharability. A related image or logo can work for this purpose. Use a file name and descriptive text caption. Your camera phone or iStock photos are fine. Videos are also a big plus and discussed later in this book.
• Links: To your other author platform locations, to friends and associate blogs, related articles and posts, etc.
• Comment boxes: You moderate what comments will appear. Try to get as many comments as you can, starting with asking your friends and associates for comments, and sharing your own comments with them reciprocally. Responsiveness counts: Answer each and every one of them.

Creating Content for Blog Posts

How do you tailor content to your audience once you understand the needs and interests of your audience? As an example, our author clients form a large audience for this book. I’ve tirelessly listened to authors’ issues and concerns about platform for many years and am responding with the solution—this book. I know well that my literary agency clients generally don’t have much time available after doing their day-to-day jobs and writing a book; these clients have demanded a complete, pre-digested, easy-to-follow formula for creating their own author platform. In deciding the table of contents and coverage, we have tailored the content of this book for that audience, which we understand well. That’s why we included “best of” recommendations instead of endless choices, why we don’t use marketing jargon, and why we’re presenting a complete system under one roof instead of making our readers chase multiple tips that are scattered around the Internet.

Knowing the time constraints of our own authors, we’re willing to bet that you don’t have much time for posting original content every day, so try posting at least once a week, without fail, up until the time of your book’s publication. To save you time, here are content and posting shortcuts.

The main thing to remember is that posting original, content-rich blog entries, however often you post, keeps your blog fresh so your readership will not migrate elsewhere.

Start posts with an interesting headline to engage readers and make your content more shareable. While your headline’s foremost objective is telling potential readers what your post is about, editors know that informative headlines that grab a reader’s attention in other ways are the most valuable. Be aware that WordPress, and most other blog platforms, use the post headline to create the permalink URL for that post. Your choice of headline matters!

Capture readership by writing in the first person in your authentic personal voice. As a book author, you have established that you have a lot to say through the written word. By sharing open and honest perspectives, thoughts, and observations that you know your readers will be interested in, you provide relevant and timely content that keeps your audience engaged. Here are some ideas to keep your blog fresh with minimum effort; choose from one or more of these types per week:

• Excerpts from your book, of course!
• Short excerpts from others’ books that have helped you. Add a comment on reposts of others’ work.
• Reviews of books/articles/blogs you recommend.
• Ideas relevant to your subject matter (and offer opinions).
• Personal story behind an experience you had related to your book.
• Anecdote: a lesson you learned from someone.
• A quote, plus commentary.
• Conversation or interview.
• Lists/resources.
• Reposts of articles you found on the web that are interesting and relevant and/or news and current issues related to your subject. We don’t recommend this as your main posting strategy but as a fill-in to keep content fresh.
• An idea chosen from your book; express your opinion of it as the thought leader that you are. The crowd loves the controversial, so challenge an idea instead of playing it safe to generate more comments, sharing, and interaction.

Save time by setting up a monthly appointment with yourself to write multiple blog entries at one time and then schedule them. All blog platforms allow you to schedule your posts weeks ahead of time if you like.

As many authors do, use sidebars on all of your posts to show your book cover, upcoming publication date, and more information about the book’s launch.

Getting Comments on Blog Posts

Comments on blog posts are a critical component of building a community around your writing. However often you post, you can get feedback just as often. Comments mean engagement, which builds community and attracts more visitors. In addition, comments not only add fresh content to your site, but also benefit you by adding to your findability through SEO.

Every blog platform by default offers your readers a chance to comment on every post. As an author attempting to build a community of readers, you don’t just want to allow your visitors the chance to comment; you want to encourage visitors to comment. Here’s how:

• End every post with a question, even if it’s just to ask for comments and feedback.
• Take a poll or vote on some aspect of your post.
• Create a list and ask readers to add to that list.
• Give a prize for the best comment.
• Make a controversial statement.
• Show a weakness or vulnerability.
• Use a comment as a jumping-off point for your next blog post. When comments come in, welcome them this way:
  • Respond as soon as possible to each comment in a way that encourages a dialogue. Set up your blog platform to email or text you when comments arrive.
  • Praise the comment. You can still disagree with the comment, but thank the commenter for taking the time to engage, and ask for others’ feedback.
• Comments are solid source material for your overall blogging content. If you are starting out, use comments from other social networks that you are a part of and then grow as readers comment on your blog. You can ask anyone who reaches out to you through email or online comments if you can use their questions or observations to start your blog entry. Savvy bloggers base their next blog post on a user comment from the previous blog post. When you reply to your blog comments, try this to increase future comments:
  • Instead of a closed-ended “thank you,” offer the reader something, like a blog or book that would help them, or words of encouragement or further advice;
  • Expand your point further when you reply;
  • Ask yet another question;
  • Exchange comments with others bloggers.

Be sure it is easy and welcoming to comment:

• You shouldn’t have to log in to comment (though your platform may offer some benefits to those logging in).
• The comment box should offer ample space and expand to fit the size of the comment.
• Join in with a new blogger community like Triberr.com or Bloggers.com.
• Join groups on LinkedIn/Facebook and ask for comments.
• Ask your network, friends, and associates for comments.

Regarding Trolls

Be prepared in advance that there are people out there who enjoy nothing more than ripping apart everything they encounter on the Internet. We’re currently seeing a backlash to the “go for the jugular” approach to nasty comments. One example is BuzzFeed’s announced banning of the negative book review (Garfield, “Banning the Negative Book Review” NYT 12/4/13). But trolls will persist, so you can adopt one of three policies regarding trolls:

• Ignore them, also known as “Don’t feed the trolls.” This is the only exception to the “respond to every comment” rule. If someone is clearly just trying to bait you into saying something stupid or regrettable, resist the temptation. If you want to be polite in ignoring the troll, just write “Thank you for your comment.” If the person responds and escalates the conflict based on that response, that’s a troll.
• Respond with a spirited defense of yourself and your ideas. Really only worth doing if others in your audience respond to the troll.
• Be so crushed that you never post again and rue the day you ever thought you could be a writer. An all-too-common response that only encourages the troll to try again.

Blog Shortcuts

In three decades of working with thought leaders, experience has shown that all have a lack of time in common. These leaders have difficulty finding time to write a book (which I believe is the responsibility of every cutting-edge thinker), and a blog is an added time burden. Here are the steps used to keep blogging time minimal:

• Work ahead and use the power of the web to automate posts.
• Write your month of blog posts on the first day of each month.
• Use Blogjet (Windows) or MarsEdit (Mac) to automatically schedule each post.
• Use an online newsletter service, like the free MailChimp, to tell your audience when you’ve added a post.

WORDPRESS POST TYPES

• Standard—Your normal, average, everyday blog post. This is the default styling for your theme.
• Gallery—Usually will show a thumbnail from the blog post, as well as an excerpt of what the gallery is about.
• Aside—Brief snippets of text without headlines that aren’t quite whole blog posts. Useful for quick thoughts and anecdotes.
• Image—These posts highlight your images.
• Status—Short updates about what you’re doing right now.
• Quote—These posts highlight your block-quoted text in a bolder way than standard posts do.
• Video—Just like Image posts, these posts highlight your videos.
• Audio—Just like Image and Video, these posts highlight your Audio attachments.
• Chat—These posts highlight snippets of memorable conversations you have with friends, both online and offline.

Author Blog Promotion Strategies

The last step to make your blog a successful magnet for your book is to promote your blog. You want to increase your audience size, keep the audience you already have, and encourage sharing your posts as much as possible.

Include Social Sharing buttons: Be sure to make it easy to share your posts and share posts of others to get reciprocal sharing. Include sharing buttons prominently at the bottom of each post to allow readers to share posts easily via email or other social networks, right from their mobile devices or laptops. Having these included in every post ensures (and reminds) others to publicize your blog for you!

WordPress.com offers this option. Go to Settings > Sharing. Scroll down to the Sharing Buttons option. Drag all the buttons down to the Enabled Services area. It doesn’t matter whether you have an account at a particular social location; these buttons are for your readers. When you’re finished dragging the buttons, review the other settings on the page, then click Save Changes. The buttons you selected should now appear at the bottom of every post. It should look something like the figure below. You can get the same effect in self-hosted WordPress with the Jetpack plugin.

Advertise your blog when you email: Include your blog’s name and URL in your automatic signature line that attaches to the end of every message you send.

Link your blog to other blogs: Submit your blog to online directories. Post your blog URL on multiple message boards and check your page views.

Use RSS feed on your blog site: When people subscribe to your RSS feed, they are informed of updates and are more likely to read your posts. Your blogging platform should create this feed automatically.

Comment on others’ blogs: Be sure to include the name of your blog and your website URL. People who like your comment will click back to your blog.

In settings, use Send Pings: Once you activate this setting, your blog will be added to recently updated lists on the web.

Get blog reviews: Link to the posts of other bloggers, and if they like your posts, they’ll likely link back to you.

Guest blog: Find blogs similar to yours that share content. Look for similar blogs on your subject matter that have audiences that comment regularly. Search to find guest blogging opportunities by typing in words such as “submit a guest post” along with your subject matter keywords. Many book blogs have a guest post submission page that you can fill out. Contact other bloggers with praise for their blog and ask if they would be interested in your doing a guest post. Likewise, ask them if they’d like to guest post for you; exchanging guest posts allows you to cross-network with many other bloggers. My Blog Guest (myblogguest.com), a web community of guest bloggers, is a great place to sign up to find related blogs accepting guest posts.

Measure Your Blog Results to Understand Your Audience

Maybe you don’t know this, but we hope you do: Every website takes note of every visit it gets and can report that information to its owner. When you own a website, that’s a good thing.

WordPress.com and Blogspot provide you with assorted statistics related to the number of visitors you have to your hosted blog. You can see these statistics on your dashboard. WordPress offers even more detailed statistics at WordPress.com/stats. This table shows you each type of tracked information and how you can use this data to measure your audience.

You’ll become engaged (and perhaps addicted) to checking these statistics every time you post, wondering whether your latest and greatest entry is finding its audience. Did we mention that the WordPress mobile apps let you check stats with your phone without even looking at your site? Yet instead of seeing your statistics as just another distraction, you need to think about your statistics in a more long-term way. Ideally, the overall numbers grow, in terms of visitors, subscribers, and commenters. Statistics allow you to help give the people what they want and also determine if you’re providing the service your audience needs.

Table 1: WordPress Statistics Categories.

Statistic	Description
Traffic/Visitors	The bar graph shows users who actually visited your site along with users who saw your post via a really simple syndication (RSS) feed. You can get this information for recent days, weeks, and months.
Views by Country	Where does your audience live? The world map shows where your visitors came from today and yesterday. You can also get summaries stretching back into the past. This information might help you determine whether you need to simplify your vocabulary to facilitate translation.
Top Posts and Pages	What people are reading. On the dashboard, you’ll learn what’s hot and what’s not. Summaries covering the entire history of your blog are available.
Clicks	Have you got links in your posts? (You should!) See what links your readers are clicking to find out how many are interested in digging deeper into your topic.
Referrers	How did people find your blog? Through a particular search engine? From a link elsewhere on the web? This is how you find out if your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is working. You may also find other bloggers to connect with after they connect to you.
Search Engine Terms	If people visited you as a result of a web search, you can learn the terms of the actual search they used.
Tags and Categories	In WordPress, categories define the main topics you cover in your blog. Tags are the more specific topics included in each post. Think of categories as a table of contents, while tags are index terms. WordPress statistics shows you the most popular topics in your blog.
Followers	The number of subscribers to your blog through the blog itself. This number grows with every interesting post. When you get a sufficient number of followers, it’s time to start a newsletter to keep them in the loop.
Comments	The people who have commented most on your blog.

Watch your Top Posts and Pages list for defining characteristics of your popular posts. If you’ve got a mix of practical information, link collections, photos, and opinion pieces related to your area of expertise, see if people read one type of post over another. If, for example, three-quarters of your posts are opinions, but all your top posts are instructional, perhaps you want to change that balance a little. People may respect the information you’re giving them, but your arguments related to controversies in your field could be stronger.

Look over the Search Engine Terms report. If someone was looking for a solution to a problem addressed in your book, could they find the answer in your blog? If not, perhaps you should add a post on that topic.

What posts generated the most commentary? Can you follow up with a summary discussion? If something happens to advance the discussion, be sure to schedule a post about the new development.

Link Your Blog to Your Social Sites

Always connect your social networks to your blog through linking! As you work your way through this book, you’ll find explanations of social networking capabilities of the Internet you can use to supercharge your efforts. Without connecting via linking, you’re not fulling realizing what online tools can do for you. So, as you build, be sure to link your blog to your social sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Twitter: Tweet a message (Chapter 3) with a link to your newly updated blog page. Share a link to your latest post each time you post.

Google+: Predictions are that Google+ will surpass Facebook in users in the not too distant future. Be sure to post on Google+ (Chapter 4) and provide the URL of your blog post along with announcements of your new blog posts to guide incoming traffic to your website.

Facebook: Also share your blog post URL on Facebook (Chapter 5) via your author Page and personal page to get more visibility for your blog, and then use the techniques above to solicit comments. Promote your blog post on your Facebook feed at high-traffic times to make sure people see it. An automated posting site like Hootsuite will choose these optimum times for you so you don’t have to think it through. Use Facebook groups to post to a large number of people with a single click. Do not oversell the post, just post the link with a quick line communicating the value of the post.

LinkedIn: Be sure to post your blog post URL as a LinkedIn status update (Chapter 6) on both your company and your personal profiles, along with a very short description. Use LinkedIn groups to maximize exposure with a single click. Again, do not oversell it, just post a quick line, as you did with Facebook.

Email/Newsletter lists: Email a short summary of the blog with a link. Your targeted email list will likely yield a surge in viewership for your blog the day the email arrives.

Above all, enjoy the blogging experience as you connect with your readers!

Checklist, Step 2: Blog

Create and link your blog to your author website, social networks, and email signature.

Choose a model and customize your blog accordingly.

Post original-content blogs consistently at least once a week.

Add reposts of others’ blogs or articles with a comment to add blog frequency.

Write from the perspective of what your audience needs.

Encourage comments and keep the conversation going via comments.

Promote your blog.

Encourage sharing via social sharing buttons at the bottom of each post.

Learn more about your audience preferences on your blog with Google Analytics.