An author blog is an effective tool for building a community and an audience of readers. You can also use your blog to promote and sell your books. And a blog interacts nicely with your social media posts and promotions.
For example, you might announce a contest on social media and link to your blog where you provide the contest details and offer visitors the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter. We’ll talk about newsletters on a different day.
They too are a great way to provide consistent connection with your reader and strengthen your community. But let’s talk about the biggest challenge romance writers have with blogging…
Creating blog content.
Your content needs to appeal to your readers and potential readers. A good way to accomplish this is to blog about a topic that is related to your romance genre or the general interests of your readers. We talked a bit about this in the blog post, How to Build an Online Community for Your Romance Author’s Blog.
Let’s take a look at the steps you can take to create your own content plan.
* Study Your Audience – It’s imperative that before you start creating content, you understand who your audience is. Know them down to their income, desires, wants, needs, and more. This is how you’ll know what content to create, as well as how they like to consume it.
* Understand Your Niche – In addition, you need to truly understand your niche so that you can write and educate your audience about it. You’ll need to create content that is engaging, informative, educational and that encourages your audience to interact with them.
* Know What You Want to Accomplish – It helps to also know what you are trying to accomplish with each blog post. Are you selling a book, building anticipation for an upcoming release, or maybe building your email list or social media followers. Know your goal.
* Choose Which Types of Content You Want to Use – You’ll may want to use many types of content, such as text, video, images, and more to keep your audience’s interest. Choose a format that works for you. Later, you may decide to add more variety to your posts.
* Create an Editorial Calendar – Create an editorial calendar to help you keep your content plan organized. You can always add more content as new ideas and book projects are released. To begin, create a plan for the topics you’ll write about, when you’ll publish that content, how you’ll promote the blog posts and the goal for each post.
* Find Help – If you’re not sure how to go forward, read and study the experts. Check out the blogs of your favorite authors. Emulate them. Read about blogging for authors. Here are two great books to consider:
Rise of the Machines – Human Authors in a Digital World
The Author’s Platform: A Beginner’s Guide
* Repeat – Once you set things up and create momentum, keep it going. Blogging is a long-term commitment that builds over time. Creating content for your blog needs to be something you do on a regular and ongoing basis. Shoot for once or twice a week at first.
Don’t stress if you only have 10 visits to your blog in the first week or two. Share your posts on social media, engage with your readers and followers, and have fun. Your blog will grow and so too will your romance royalties and sales.
To your romance writing success!