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Why it’s Important to Have a Blog and What to Write About

April 12, 2020 by Denise M. Colby in category The Writing Journey by Denise Colby tagged as Denise M. Colby, SEO Marketing

Writing a blog takes time away from writing your books, but a blog is something an author shouldn’t go without. Why is it important to have a blog and what do you write about? I’ll go over both of those questions in this post.

Blog Header titled Why It's Important to Have a Blog by Denise M. Colby Marketing for Authors

Just know, the most important reason for a blog, is your brand.

If done correctly, blog posts can help build your brand.

And your brand will thank you for it.

Here are four ways a blog helps build your brand:

1. You choose what your write about.

All of the parts in your stories build brand because this is what your books are about. Readers choose your books because of the genre, setting, characters, era, and other details, so why wouldn’t they be interested in learning more about those things in blog posts?

Don’t share where your book is being sold (unless it is a new release), but you can share about research, or why a character likes the color blue, or even a theme of your book (When the Plan Does Not Go According to Plan) which all relates back to your books. It might even help new readers to go search for your book and buy it.

2. Build relationship with your readers.

It takes a long time for a new book to hit the market, so connecting with your readers frequently keeps you in their minds.

Build excitement for the next book by sharing a little about your characters or other topics (see point #1) in your books.

You can also connect with your readers about topics that are near and dear to you. Being a Disney fan, I’m working on building blog posts related to my favorite things about Disney.

3. Build interest in your new books as well as your previous ones.

By connecting with readers, they can learn more about you and your books. A blog post about a past book and how much a specific character was your favorite to write about, or a trip you took to conduct research and your favorite sites, might encourage a reader to buy that book and read it.

In my post from this blog, It’s a Short & Sweet Mother’s Day I wrote about my first Mother’s Day without my mom and then the tribute article that was printed in a book titled Short & Sweet Family Album.

4. It adds new SEO onto your website

One of the only ways to add SEO to your website is NEW content. Even a monthly blog allows the internet to see your website is not stagnent. But more than that, having a planned out strategy for your categories and tags, allows you to build your brand within your SEO.

In theory, readers who are interested in stories that include one-room schoolhouses, would be able to search and find web site pages related to one-room schoolhouses (It’s the One-Room Schoolhouse’s Fault), which in turn might lead them to my book. Or a post related to bookmarks (For the Love of Bookmarks), might connect with a reader who also collects bookmarks. That connection may encourage them to follow you and purchase your books in the future.

I don’t have published books, yet. But I’m building these concepts into my content on my website and blog now.

Screen shot of search with the words I love Bookmarks Denise to find Bookmark blog post — A search for ‘I Love Bookmarks Denise’ brings up my blog post and photos that went with it.

Once you brainstorm ideas, the choices of what to write about is unlimited. And provides another way to find new readers and connect and build a following with existing ones.

So don’t turn away from writing a blog. Embrance it. And consider writing for an outside blog as well. See last month’s post on Why Link Building On Your Website and Blog is Important to learn why I make this suggestion.

I love the topic of Brand and SEO and helping authors develop both. If you are interested in learning more, sign up for my Marketing for Authors newsletter.

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Why Link Building on Your Website and Blog is Important

March 12, 2020 by Denise M. Colby in category The Writing Journey by Denise Colby tagged as Denise M. Colby, Link building, Marketing for Authors, SEO Marketing

Link building on your website and blog posts is important because it helps build your SEO (search engine optimization). Google uses links to measure the quality of a page. The more links there are that go back to that page from good sources, the higher the SEO. Link building is only one part of the bigger SEO picture, but for this post, I’m discussing link building only.

Linking between other websites and/or pages is important

Why is it important to have other pages link to your page and vice versa?

It’s a vote of confidence that what you’ve written is worth reading. Similar to a recommendation for say a plumber, car repair, or a restaurant.

There are other benefits to link building as well:

Relationships between websites
Referral Traffic
Building your brand

The algorithm Google uses changes constantly, so no one truly knows specifically how much link building is appropriate, but in my research there are things you should and should not do. Do not submit your website to a web directory in order to get a link in return.

True organic links work best
Denise m. Colby

This means links should be complementary to the content that the blog post is written about. Adding links is also a great way to provide extra content to your readers.

But what if you don’t have anything to link?

I have found some web pages and blog posts I write have links that naturally fit, and then with other pages and blog posts, I draw a blank. I especially found it difficult when my website and blog were brand new.

Potential content ideas that include link building:

Your welcome page can introduce your other pages with links to those pages (even if you have a menu).
Create a page for each book you’ve written and then talk about each one in a separate blog post and put the link to the book page in it.
If you are unpublished, you could write a blog post about setting, clothes, animals or any other topic that connects with your manuscript and include links to a pinterest page with sample photos.
Review other writers’ books and include links to where the book can be purchased.
Write a blog post about craft and include a link to the website or person where you learned about that topic.

Whatever you do, don’t despair. As you add content to your website and/or blog, you are building content. That content may be linkable material later. Just keep building your content.

For example, I have written several blog posts about SEO both on my own blog (Why the M), and here on A Slice of Orange (What is Alt Text and How To Use it).

And, my Marketing for Authors program now has a newsletter (where you can sign up and receive a free booklet of SEO help), with the plan to have training courses available this year.

Did you see what I did there? I added several links to previous blog posts as well as actual pages on my website, all in some way related to the topic I am writing about – SEO and link building.

Screen shot of the SEO results for Link building in a blog post. The green dots shows you have enough links in your post — The goal is to show green dots in the Yoast SEO Plug-in

Remember, SEO looks at both internal and external linking, which leads me to my next tip.

Write guest blogs so that you can link back to your website.

Another way to add links to your blog post is to add your social media links. These would count for outside links.

This can be done at the bottom of your post with a phrase such as: If you’d like to connect with me on social media, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

You could even link to a specific post on your social media. Since this post is about SEO, I’m linking two separate tweets here and here I’ve posted related to SEO.

You can go back and add in links, however, it is BETTER to REWRITE a new post with a little different angle or side-topic (SEO does not like duplicate content) so it reads differently, then add a link to your old post.

Remember, links can include other pages or posts on your website. Circling in a loop is okay. And you can add links to both words (Anchor Text) or photos. The goal would be for every blog post to have at least two links in it (one internal and one external).

There are many other things to learn about link building, but I will save those tips for another post. For now this is enough to get your started.

Give it time. You won’t have enough content in the beginning to do this right away. But in time you will be able to add link building into your SEO plans.

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