How Blogging Can Help Accelerate Your Success

Due to the Internet it is now so easy to build relationships with your readers, create a buzz around yourself and gain the attention of prospective agents and publishers. Blogging is a great way to achieve this. A well-written blog can place you – the author – into direct contact with your target market.

Blogging is all about making social connections. Through blogging you are able to connect to a specific target audience, learn who they are, their ages, their likes and dislikes. You can even find out what they’re conversing about. In this way it is possible to target your readership directly. You can even get feedback from your market group, enabling you to fine-tune your product to appeal directly to them.

There are at least four ways to use blogging to build your success as an author.

1. Really get to know your readers. Blogging allows you to build personal relationships. You can use blogs to understand your readers, their thoughts, their desires – in a way that was never possible before. This insight into your readers’ minds provides valuable Intel for you as a writer. You need to harness this information and use it to position and market your novels.
2. Advertise your blog. Writing tiny ads that other people can put on their blogs is one way of driving traffic to your blog. Choose other blogs carefully, making sure your target markets align and contact the blog writer to swop blog links or ads. This way you tap into a ready-made market.
3. Become a professional blogger. Many companies would like to hire someone to blog full time for them but are loath to use internal staff since it takes time and effort that they don’t have. This is where you can fit in. Again, choose carefully so that you are blogging to your specific target market. Use your writing talent and unique voice to create a buzz around yourself and your subject. Try to align your blogging topics with your novels, or at least with writing in general, so you can ‘prove’ to your readership that you have talent.
4. Self promotion. Blog sites are easier for search engines to crawl, than websites. So by posting frequent fresh content on your blog, you’re enabling search engines to find you and list you on Google results pages. This means you’re making it easier for potential readers, agents and publishers to find you.

Starting a blog is not complicated, in fact there are several easy ways to get going. In my next blog I’ll discuss two of the easiest options – WordPress and Blogger – which are both free blogging services.

Finally here are three tips for successful blogging:

1. Write in your unique voice. The purpose of a blog is to connect with your readers, so speak to them in ‘their’ language. Use conversational English, stacked with personality and warmth. Keep your tone informal and interesting, polite and respectful.
2. Engage your readers. Blogs are great mechanisms for feedback. This vital information is how you get to know your readers better. In order to encourage feedback you need to talk about topics that they’ll find interesting.
3. Provide fresh, interesting content. To keep your readers entertained and coming back to your blog, you need to provide readable content. Keep it fresh and up to date. You’re working on forming relationships here, so you need to concentrate on providing your readers with what they want.

Happy blogging!

Yours in successful online marketing
Louise Rose-Innes
http://www.louiserose-innes.com