How to Start a Blog to Promote Your Book — Part 1

If you’ve already published your book, you probably know that it takes more than simply hitting that publish button to reach your readers. To understand the challenges that lie ahead of you, consider how many books are published on Amazon every day. According to an article published by TechCrunch in 2014, there was one new book published on Amazon’s website every five minutes. Two things are important to note about this statistic:

1. That statistic is six years old, so you can imagine how much things have changed in today’s publishing world.
2. This only accounts for the books published on Amazon’s website, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a large number of books published on other platforms at different rates.

So, with so many new things to read, it becomes increasingly challenging to find readers who are interested in what you’re writing about. One thing that can help bring your readers right to your front door is blogging. We’ve created a ten-step guide to getting you through writing your first blog post. (The first five steps are in this blog post, and we’ll continue with part two in our next blog post.)

Step 1: Find your blogging platform.

We recommend hosting your blog directly on your author website, because if readers enjoy your blog posts, there will be much more information for them to discover about you, your books, and what other products and/or services you have to offer.

However, there are several other platforms available for free:

• Medium
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• Guest blogging on other established blogs

Step 2: Design your content.

Since you don’t want to start writing random blog posts, you’ll need to create a structured plan that outlines exactly what your blog is about. To find readers who might be interested in your book, there are two ways you could tackle that:

1. You could write about themes or subjects related to your book.
2. You could write articles that may interest your ideal reader.

The first is more focused on your specific book, and the second has a broader focus on a variety of topics that will appeal to your readers.

Take some time to brainstorm between three to ten categories you’ll write about on your blog. Then, underneath each main category, you can create a few subcategories that will guide what you write about within each category.

Step 3: Create an editorial calendar.

First, decide how often you’d like to post. Some bloggers post once a month, some once a week, and some once a day. Think about how much time you have available to commit to blogging and pick a posting frequency that works well for you. If you’ve never blogged before, you might want to start out slow in the first few months. You can start out by posting every other week. Then, after one or two months of being consistent, you may increase that by publishing one blog post every week. And, if you’d like to start posting more, you can work your way toward posting two blog posts per week.

Step 4: Research your topics.

There are two types of research we recommend doing before you start brainstorming ideas:

1. Do Internet searches for blogs on your topic. This will help you identify where there are holes in the market, and you can help solve that problem by writing content that doesn’t yet exist. This will help you gain favor with the search engine algorithms (the computers that calculate your ranking on Google and other search platforms), and it will also tell your readers that you have something unique to offer over what the other bloggers do.
   
2. Do some keyword research. It’s not enough to write on a unique topic; you must also find a unique topic that your ideal reader is searching for. You can find out how popular certain keywords are by doing keyword research. There are tons of keyword research tools out there that will tell you exactly how many people are searching a particular topic every day, and they will also give you stats on other keywords related to the one you searched. These can be powerful tools if you use them regularly.

Step 5: Start brainstorming blog ideas.

The easiest way to break this down and get a long list of ideas is to come up with 10 to 20 ideas for each category you listed in Step 2. If you have ten categories, you can easily generate a list of 100 within a few hours just by listing ten ideas for each category. Then, when you’re ready to start developing ideas for a post, you can go to your list for an idea you can start writing about immediately. 

Want to learn some copywriting trade secrets? One tool we feel will really help you step up your game is Author Wizards. With at least 50 copywriting tools to minimize the amount of time you spend writing, you’ll streamline your content marketing process for social media, blogs, eBooks, marketing copy, landing pages, and much more.

Check back here next week for the next five steps to launching a blog to promote your published books.

Do you already have a blog? Comment below with a link to your most popular blog post so our readers can get inspired from the hard work you’ve done to build your own blog. Or, if you don’t already have a blog and want to start one, what do you want to start blogging about? We’d love to know!