This post, by Renee Pawlish, originally appeared on her Master Wordsmith blog.
Did that title get your attention? Let’s face it, indie author marketing is tough work (indie author marketing success even more so). And so many indie authors will tell you that you need a blog for effective marketing. Well, yes and no. I’m actually all for having a blog, ifyou are doing this for the right reasons, and you are avoiding some key mistakes.
Having a poorly designed blog or one with little content can do just as much damage as good for you as an author, so you must think about why you have a blog in the first place. I’ve touched on some of these points before, and I’ve added some new things here as well…
Indie Author Marketing – Reasons To Have A Blog
The primary purpose of blogging, for indie authors, is to help you sell books (unless you’re running a blog like this one that focuses on helping indie authors with writing and marketing). Here are some of the things a blog can do for you:
- it can connect you with potential readers
- it can build your audience
- it can showcase your writing skills
- it can generate book sales
- it can position you as an expert in your genre
- it can generate traffic to your author website
- it can give you credibility as an author (great if you want to get an agent)
- and more…
Okay, you’ve probably heard of all of those and could add to the list. And you may be asking yourself, I do these, so why isn’t it working?
Indie Author Marketing – Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Working
As I meet more and more indie authors, I see numerous things that they do with their blogs that actually harm their blogging efforts:
- having a poorly designed blog
- spelling or grammatical errors
- blogging inconsistently (this doesn’t encourage people to come back because they see you’re inactive)
- only blogging about your books (and saying buy my books all the time)
- little or no book information
- not linking your books directly to Amazon or other selling sites
- not having a niche (you have to target your audience and write to them)
- sharing your posts with those that aren’t in your target audience (I see this on Triberr a lot)
Now that we know the good and bad about our blogs, what can we do to correct things?
Indie Author Marketing – The Big Key – Your Blog Design
Read the rest of the post, which gives further detail on each of the above bullet items, on Renee Pawlish’s Master Wordsmith blog.