Finding host blogs for your author blog tour

A blog tour is a great way to generate word of mouth for your book. The first step is to comb the Web for blogs where you'd like to appear.

Once you’ve identified a list of relevant, potential blog hosts, prioritize your list by three main criteria: activity level, reader involvement and traffic volume.

• Activity level. How frequently do new posts appear on the blog? Bloggers usually must post at least a few times week to sustain a loyal readership. Examine the past few months of blog archives to determine the posting frequency.

• Reader involvement. How often do readers chime in with thoughtful comments? This indicates whether a blog has loyal readership. Successful blogs have a core audience that posts frequent follow-up commentary and questions.

• Traffic volume. Traffic is the natural result of blog activity and reader involvement and it’s an objective measure of a blog’s impact. A handy yardstick for measuring blog traffic is Alexa.com, which provides estimated traffic reports on many Web sites.

At Alexa.com’s top navigation bar, click Traffic Rankings. Enter the address of the blog you want to evaluate and click Get Traffic Details. For blogs with very low traffic, the result will be: “No data.” For blogs that have been publishing for a while and have considerable traffic, you’ll see an Alexa ranking ranging from 1 (the most-visited site on the Web) to about 5 million, meaning very low readership.

Alexa provides detailed traffic estimates and more details about the top 100,000 sites. Under the heading “Explore this site,” you’ll see links for Traffic Details, Related Links, and Sites linking in.

Alexa’s Traffic Details gives estimates of the blog’s relative reach and number of page views, and whether the site’s popularity is trending up or down. Clicking on Related Links shows other sites visited frequently by the same audience. Sites Linking In shows which sites, ranked by authority, have incoming links to the blog.

Although there are millions of blogs, a relative few have substantial readership. Depending on how narrowly focused your book is, you may find only a few relevant top-tier blogs. For a narrowly focused topic, you might find some potential blog hosts below the 100,000-rank threshold where Alexa provides detailed reports. A small well-qualified audience who cares about your book’s topic will provide better results than a larger, general audience.
Alexa’s reports aren’t foolproof, they’re drawn from a small sample of Web users who use an Alexa browser toolbar. Rankings for high-traffic sites are more statistically accurate than reports for niche sites. In any case, Alexa is a handy, free source of objective information about Web traffic, and is more accurate than anecdotal reporting. Bloggers and Webmasters usually overestimate their traffic by a wide margin.

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. For a backup check on relative traffic levels, you can consult MetricsMarket.com.