The Basic Aims Of A Fiction Writer’s Blog

Published on: Jan 7, 2010 @ 11:48

You hear it over and over again. Marketers everywhere tell you “Get a blog!”

So you rush out, set up a blog, even shell out for your domain, pick out a pretty theme, write a few posts, and in the resounding silence that greets you, while you listen to the crickets chirp, you wonder “why am I here, exactly?”

There’s some excellent reasons why you’re blogging. Fiction writers everywhere should be blogging their guts out, each and every day. Blogging is made for fiction writers, but unless you know what you’re doing and why, and what you should be aiming for, your blog will sit there with an Alexa ranking around 25M or so, collecting dust, and when you dismantle the blog six months down the track and declare that blogging is a game for idiots, you’ll have missed the greatest marketing opportunity in the world.

Here’s your primary goals as a blogging fiction writer:

1. Alexa Ranking

Go to Alexa and download and install the Alexa toolbar for your Internet browser. Alexa is a tool for comparing and ranking every website and blog on the Internet, everywhere. If you install the toolbar, then you don’t have to go to Alexa to get any site’s ranking, it just appears when you’re on that site — including your own. Alexa rankings are a combination of seven statistics and if your ranking is improving, you’re doing things right. Aim to keep improving month by month. Once you get down under one million, the improvements will start to slow down and inch along, but you should still work to make small improvements and tweaks even at this level.

2. Build your Traffic

Keep an eye on your statistics — install a plug-in if you don’t have statistics readily available. Learn what helps to improve traffic to your blog and put those strategies into action. High volume traffic is one of the keys to making your blog a success, and everything hinges on traffic. The type of traffic is also critical, but you need volume before anything else.

3. Content and comments.

Work on improving the quality and quantity of your posts — aim for daily as often as you can manage it. Research what makes a good post, and what your readers respond to. In particular, what sort of posts generate the most comments. Keep track of comments statistics, as this is part of what builds a sense of community on your blog, and readers who feel they’re a part of a community will continue to return. Make sure you encourage that community by responding to comments at all times.

4. Improving Your Google Results

How your work your blog has an indirect effect on your Google results — this is basic Search Engine Optimisation. Make sure you properly tag and categorize your posts, adding your genre and sub-genre to all posts that mention your book titles, so that Google can find you when it needs to. The aim is to have your blog posts appear in the first two pages of Google search page results when someone types in your genre or sub-genre as a search term. If you don’t appear in the first two pages, the chances are the reader isn’t going to search much beyond the first two pages of results, and won’t come across your blog. As static websites have even less chance of popping up in Google results as their contents are updated even less often than blogs, your blog is your best hope of being found on Google, so work that content!

5. Assiduously Promote Your Blog

There are ways to promote your blog that don’t involve advertising, link-trading, link-baiting, or other nefarious time-wasters. For you, the fiction author, most of them fall under the category of “social networking” and simply channelling your blog’s RSS feed through to your social networking accounts, hanging out and being a real person. If you’re writing interesting content on your blog, the RSS feed will do the rest. This is where you have the advantage over other non-writer-oriented bloggers. Dashing off interesting posts is second nature to you.

6. Building your RSS and Email Subscriber Numbers

Make sure you’re running your RSS feed through Feedburner, instead of leaving it at the default, generic RSS 2.0 feed. Feedburner will give you statistics on how many people are subscribed to your feed, and let you offer the feed via email for people who like to have the feed delivered to their email inbox, plus a whole array of other Google-friendly options (Feedburner is owned by Google) that you should take advantage of, including widgets you can add to your sidebars to help coax readers to sign up.

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The reasons for all this industry and obsession over statistics, apart from those I have given you, above, are:

The more popular your blog is, the more readers will hear of your name, and your books’ titles. The more they hear of your books’ titles (the more “impressions” they get) the more inclined they’ll be to buy them.
Combined with your social networking activities, the more popular your blog is, the more cross-linked and re-twittered it will be around the net, bringing more traffic to your blog, and exposing readers to your name and your books, and your books’ buy pages.
All of the above, and these last two points, will improve your search engine results, bringing even more traffic to your blog, and more readers to your buy pages.
And around and around and around it goes….

First appeared on Bootstrap Bookmarketing Coop.