Beware of addressing your blog only to other writers. It’s easy to reach out to your writer peers on social media and write to them on your blog, but that kind of effort will only bring more writers to your site. Writers don’t typically spend a lot of money on others’ books. (Not totally true, I know!) Go for the gold: the readers.
You recall we’re in a series of Monday marketing articles discussing how to get people to find you on the Internet when they are looking for what you offer. To make your website findable in the search engine listings (the free ones), you can incorporate a blog in the website and put pithy articles on it that people will want to share with others.
One more thing. These blog articles need to be tagged with keywords that match what your ideal customer would type into a search engine.
Keywords? What are those? Terms your ideal customer would use to look for someone like you. Sit down and have a brainstorm with yourself or someone else. Imagine this ideal customer, or several of them. What are they looking for? Come up with a list of words. Try typing them into Google, one by one. Does Google pull up sites that offer something similar to yours?
Do the exercise again, focusing on words related to popular trends. You can see what’s trending on Yahoo.com and other such news sites. The more you can tie in to trends, the more attention you’ll get.
Now, what to do with your list?
Write a blog post containing one or two of these keywords. Talk about the trend a little bit, and how your book relates to it. Look around for a place to “tag” the blog post in the blog software. (If you don’t have it, talk to the person who designed your website and get it put in.) Add keywords as tags. Be sure to put your own name in as a tag. A tag can be a phrase, by the way. Just separate using commas.
Update the blog post, and there you are! Be sure to link to it from Facebook and your favorite social media. Keep doing it, and soon Google will be sending people your way!