Blogging your way to more book sales

Should you be blogging? It's a no-brainer. Any author who isn't blogging to promote their book is ignoring a big slice of readers and book sales.

Blogging is one of the major marketing trends of this century, and it's a tailor-made for authors. Writers are natural bloggers, and their audience is natural blog readers.

Blogs are the easiest, cheapest, and perhaps best way for authors to find a following and connect with readers. Blogs are personal, and readers feel special when they gain access to the author's space.

For most authors, the free buzz you can create with a blog will bring you a wider audience and more sales than all the advertising you can buy -- assuming you have money to burn.

I began marketing my first book, a self-published niche nonfiction book in November 2005. For the first two months, I spent $4,000 on Google Adwords to bring readers to a Web page describing my book. I was horrified to discover that hardly anyone who clicked on my ad bought the book. The Google ads didn't result in any book sales -- on my site, on Amazon.com, or anywhere else.

Then I began writing daily posts to my blog related to the book. Immediately, I noticed lots of "free" traffic from Google search results (from people searching for words that happened to be in my blog posts). Suddenly I was getting more "free" traffic than I had been able to buy through advertising. And I was buying all I could -- I placed Adwords bids on literally every word in my book's index.

Most importantly, I noticed that the people who came to my site through "free" search results got much more involved with my content -- they would scroll through several pages and spend several minutes at my site. And obviously, some of those folks bought the book, because that's when sales took off. By contrast, people who came to my site via advertising tended to take a quick look at the landing page, and leave after just 30 seconds.

Why do blogs generate such great traffic? For one, blogs are topical. If you're writing about a single topic day in and day out, after a few months your Web site will contain a tremendous number of keyword combinations. Also, recent content enhances your search-relevance ranking with Google -- the theory being that searchers will find "fresh" content more useful and relevant.

For authors without a long track record of sales and readership, blogs are invaluable for forging new relationships. Over the course of a year's time, your book blog can generate hundreds of thousands of visits from potential readers worldwide. If you provide an e-mail address where these visitors can reach you, they will troubleshoot your book before you've even finished writing it. Your blog readers will suggest corrections in your blog posts, long before they end up on a printed page. And readers who feel they've somehow contributed to your work will be your most loyal supporters.

Besides being much easier to maintain and fresher than a plain-vanilla Web site, your author blog or book blog makes it much easier for readers to stay in contact. Most readers won't remember to re-visit a Web site they found interesting. But with a blog, where subscribing to the content is easy through syndication or e-mail, you can effortlessly stay in touch with your online audience. And the more contact you have with potential readers, the more book sales you'll have.

And beyond all the practical business reasons for having a blog, it's just a great self-motivational tool for authors. Blogs are an instant antidote to writer's block, or just plain procrastination. Sometimes you need a push to write a few paragraphs. Finishing a blog post can provide a nice jolt of energy and generate some new creative ideas.

What type of blog should you produce? Nonfiction writers will have some obvious choices related to their book's content. But there are styles to consider, including:

-- A daily diary format

-- Weekly updates

-- Issue-oriented blogs

-- Group blogs

Here's a great rundown of each of these blog approaches, courtesy of InternetWritingJournal.

Are you ready to start? One of the easiest blogging programs to use is Blogger, which is owned by Google. You can publish your blog for free on Google's Blogspot domain, and a great many bloggers do. But another option for authors is to use Blogger, then transmit their posts to their own domain via FTP. This is a wise approach since you'll be in control of domain where your posts (and inbound links point to) and you'll be free to change to a different blogging software if necessary without having to change the Web location of your blog.

Want to look at some more author blogs and book blogs? There's a directory of them here as rated by The Internet Writing Journal. A more diverse selection of author blogs is displayed at Authors' Blogs.

So if you accept the premise that a Web site is a powerful, inexpensive tool for publicizing your work and forging connections with readers, blogging is indeed a no-brainer. A blog is simply a Web site that's easy to maintain and update -- and brings fantastic free Internet traffic.

For months now, my book has been the number-two bestseller in its category on Amazon (Business/Entrepreneurship/Home-Based), and I attribute it to the blog readership and the word-of-mouth it has generated. And here's the kicker: writing the blog has been infinitely easier (not to mention cheaper!) than Adwords. Before I dumped Adwords, I'd spend several hours a day fiddling with my account settings and keywords. (I figured it once I got it "working right," I could leave it alone, but that day never came.)

I've concluded that low-margin products like books just can't be marketed effectively with pay-per-click advertising. Other publishers have found the same thing.

For higher-margin products -- for example, an insurance policy where you have a built-in marketing budget of tens of dollars -- I'm sure Adwords is an effective tool. And no doubt some publishers are able to market expensive professional books using Adwords, when they can justify spending $20 or $30 to get a customer. And Adwords might work well for some ultra-niche books, where you're the only person in the world bidding on its keywords. But for 99 percent of authors, my hunch is Adwords will be a tremendous waste of time and money.