Thanks to yesterday’s post, you now know two things about keeping an author blog:
It’s time-consuming.
There’s no guarantee it’ll be worth the effort.
But don’t let that discourage you if keeping an author blog is something you really want to do. Because, while there’s no guarantee it’ll be worth the effort, there’s also no guarantee it won’t be.
Sure, that doesn’t sound very inspirational. Perhaps far from it. So let’s reword the sentence in question to this: Publishing your writing-related musings could be wildly successful!
Fact of the matter is, you just don’t know unless you try.
So… if you think you have the time it takes… and if you have the desire… why not try?
Before you go pointing out thing-you-learned-from-yesterday’s-post #2, the heading above doesn’t say it’s a good advertisement. Only that it is, in fact, an advertisement.
And it can be a decent one – possibly even an awesome one – should you utilize it correctly.
For starters, whenever you blog, feel free to share it on social media where people who see it can access it or leave it alone as they so choose. Either way, you’ve just increased your visibility.
Your network now knows you’re keeping an author blog.
As for the rest of the 3.2 billion internet-connected individuals out there, this isn’t Pokémon. You don’t have to catch them all.
You can, however, catch some of them by using SEO-specific keywords in your blog posts and larger website.
If you don’t know what that means, the short answer is that you strategically use relevant words and phrases in your online content that people are likely to search for.
Admittedly, there’s a lot to properly applying SEO. But Paula Puddephat over at PaulaTheWriter.com has a pretty good write-up on the subject if you’d like to explore it further.
It should be mentioned that keeping an author blog can be fun. Though, admittedly, that detail isn’t worth much from a book-marketing perspective.
Unlike how keeping an author blog can be a great networking tool.
Let’s look at a math problem.
Kathy has a fantasy-specific author blog with 150 followers. Mark also has a fantasy-specific author blog with 150 followers. If they guest write for each other, how many new followers will they get?
The answer isn’t quite black and white, but it’s still worth exploring.
They might get 15 new followers out of the equation.
They might get 5.
They might get 0, which takes us right back to that whole “no guarantees” clause of keeping an author blog.
But again… there are no guarantees in any of this. No matter what route you take, marketing yourself and your writing is a process that involves testing and trying out new ways to say “I’m here!” until enough people recognize that… Hey! You’re there!
So if you want to try keeping an author blog and see if it works, go for it.
If it does work, wonderful! And if it doesn’t, well, there’s plenty more ways out there to explore.