Guest Post: How To Use Your Blog To Promote Your Book

Want to sell more of your books? Sure, we all do. Well you are in luck. This guest post by Nina Amir hits the nail right on the head when it comes to promoting your self-published books online: old-school blogs (like mine!) can help you create awareness and interest in your books, and do indeed help your books get noticed online. This is good, simple advice any indie self-published author can follow right away. I don't always follow this simple advice (though I should!) but I'm sharing anyway to help you keep your blog relevant, current and profitable.

20 Things an Author Can Blog About
By Nina Amir

Authors constantly ask me what they can blog about. They have a book-fiction or non-fiction-and they want to know how to use their blog to promote it. However, they have to keep blogging on a daily or weekly basis. They need content regularly, and they don't know what to write about.

Blogs provide a great way to promote both fiction and nonfiction books. If they are hosted on your blog--not a free blog--they drive traffic to your website. This means more people may purchase your book.

Also, frequent blog posts increase your "findability" by search engines like Google. This means your search engine ranking increases, which makes it easier for people searching for the topic of your book on the Internet to find you. The more you post on your topic, the higher up your website or blog will go on the search pages; instead of being buried on page 20, you eventually will come up in the top 10, which means anyone looking for information on your topic can find your blog, your website and your book.

Yet, the challenge to come up with content related to your book remains. Here's a list of 20 blog post idea for both fiction and nonfiction writers. It should give you plenty of ideas:

If you write fiction, you can blog about:

• How you decided on your characters.
• How you decided on your setting.
• If you book contains any personal elements.
• Your writing practice-how you write.
• Recipes related to the place where your book takes place (ex. Italian foods).
• Information on the location where you book takes place (ex. France in the 18th century).
• Issues related to those in your book or with which your characters are concerned (ex. divorce, suicide, sex, suicide).
• The benefits your book offers readers (ex. If your book illustrates that parents don't have to be perfect, discuss what it means to be a perfect parent or offer tips and tools).
• Certain passages in the book.
• The publishing process.

If you write nonfiction, you can blog about:

• Tips related to your topic.
• News related to your topic.
• Trends related to your topic.
• New research related to your topic.
• Your writing practice-how you write.
• The publishing process.
• The benefits your book offers readers.
• Your personal experience with this topic.
• Elaborations on sections, quotes or parts of your book.
• New personal teachings, insights or exercises related to your topic.

By using these 20 ideas for blog posts, you'll have lots to write about. Hopefully they'll inspire other ideas fo rmore posts as well.

Nina Amir, Your Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires writers to create the results they desire-published products and careers as writers and authors. Find out about her blog coaching here: Write a Better Blog Post. Get a free report, What's an Author's Platform & How do I Build One? here.
Article post courtesy of: Nina Amir