Post #78 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Yes, that is the actual temperature as it registered yesterday on the thermometer outside my living room window. 120 degrees in the shade. And I expect more of the same today. You might not be surprised at that temperature if I told you that my home is in Manhattan; the news is filled with stories about the heat wave that has overtaken the east coast. But it’s not. I’m in Maine…Downeast Maine…way Downeast Maine. I’m further northeast than Bar Harbor and only about 90 miles from the Canadian border. I don’t even have air conditioning in my home because we don’t need it.
Today I’d like to be lying on a bed of ice cubes rather than writing a blog, but I should have written this yesterday. So here goes: For the past several weeks, I’ve been working with a business helping them get started blogging. Some of the questions and issues that came up along the way made me realize the need for a discussion on blogging.
If you have a memoir coming out soon, or even if you’ve only just begun to write, now is the time to start a blog if you haven’t already. The advantages of a blog are many. Here are a few things to consider:
Relationship building: By blogging, you have an opportunity to open an avenue of conversation with your readers. Establish an informal, conversational style that engages readers and encourages them to comment. You see, two-way discussion is a tremendous advantage over the static web page.
Fresh content: One of the more serious mistakes (in my opinion) that some bloggers make is to place their blog someplace other than the homepage. I did a little research on this because I had a suspicion that SEO (search engine optimization) might be diminished when the blog was not on the homepage. While that seems NOT to be the case, it’s still important to place the blog on the homepage so that everyone coming to your site sees your newest, freshest information. Bury the blog someplace else on your site, and you’ll risk people coming to your site once or twice, not finding your blog and assuming that there’s nothing new and no reason to keep coming back. And you know the old adage…out of site, out of mind. Don’t let this happen to you.
SEO advantage: While there may not be a search benefit from putting your blog on the homepage, blogs most definitely give your site a boost in Google. That’s because each time you post a blog and add your keywords to your tags, meta description, custom title tag and elsewhere, you increase the number of times you and your site are linked to critical search words. Remember, even if you feel your site is not being read by many people at first, Google is always reading you…so use your keywords.
Editorial vs. promotional: Finally, I like blogs because they have greater influence with readers than static pages. Think about your own attitude toward advertising in magazines, newspapers, even TV and radio. You probably don’t weight that ad copy as highly as the articles, columns and programming. You look at an ad and think, hmmm, someone’s trying to sell me. Whereas, editorial content is viewed as information, more valuable and probably less biased. Whether this is always true, is beside the point. It’s the perception. Your blog has the same impact as editorial content, and static pages are seen more as promotional copy…like a brochure or ad.
These are just a few of the benefits from blogging. Create a blogging schedule for yourself that you’ll be able to keep and get to blogging…while I go a build a couch out of ice cubes.
memoir writing
memoir
blogging
book marketing
