Blogging for Authors: 7 Tips to Get You Started
Some authors have expressed difficulty at blogging. Here are seven tips for authors who might have difficulty getting started.
1) Focus: Start out by imagining one friend to whom you are writing–one person interested in your book or book topic. We’ll call her Friendly Fan. What is her age, gender, marital status and life circumstance? Write as if you are writing a letter to that one person.
2) Passion: Stick closely to the topics about which you have the most passion. The passion comes through, and you will attract those who share that passion.
3) Questions: Create a list of questions Friendly Fan might have about your topic. What does Friendly Fan care about? What problems does she have? What are her goals? Write her questions and then answer them. Who inspired you to write your book? Who got in your way and how did you handle it? How did you get interested in this topic? Consider answering one question per blog post.
A great example of a simple but valuable blog that uses this approach is DearEditor.com.
4) Organization / planning: A blogger is a periodical publisher. You decide the frequency: daily, semi-weekly, weekly, biweekly, or monthly. The important thing is consistency: post regularly. Put all of the questions you’ve gathered above into the calendar, planning to address each question. Put Do Not Disturb sign on the door and write a few articles, and put them into you calendar for release on the date(s) chosen. Another framework is to think of your blog as a book itself; start with a list of topics, and if it works out, turn the list into an outline. Or if you are already working on your book, take a look at your table of contents. Write a note to Friendly Fan about each chapter — not the chapter itself necessarily, but about the topic. You can use a blog post to query your readers, do market research, ask their opinion or advice. Then create a publication schedule, addressing one bullet point per post. Write your articles offline and then schedule them in your blog software for future release.
A great tool to use to organize is called Kanban. It’s a system to help track all the little things that need to be done and focus on just a few at a time, so that you don’t get overwhelmed. Like this writer, I find that Kanban helps me focus. The digital Kanban tool I use is called KanbanFlow.
5) Keywords: As you create your list or outline of blog article topics, think Keywords. What is the one single main keyword for that article? What are the related key-word strings? Note these–use a table in your word processor, or a spreadsheet. As you write and edit your blog posts, repeat the key word and strings several times in the article. If possible, include the single keyword as the first word in the title of the article.
6) Target length of articles: Current best SEO recommendation from Google is 300-700 words, no shorter than 300 words. In editing, break up long compound sentences into shorter sentences. If you wind up with an article longer than 700 words, then break it up into a series. Suppose you have a 1200 word article. Edit it into three 400-word articles. Voila! You have three blog posts. At the start of parts two and three, be sure to briefly summarize the prior posts and put a link back to the earlier article for the benefit of anyone who missed it.
7) How-to Presentations: Think about sharing with Friendly Fan how to do something. How do you prevent, repair, optimize, prepare, follow up after, etc.
Do you blog regularly? What works for you? Let’s talk about blogging at a future meeting.
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