for authors, including:
Simplicity
Ease of plugging in content generated by others in the form of questions, which leads to cooperative networking
Built-in audience interaction
Helping and giving deeper insight to others
Establishing subject matter expertise, depth, and added dimension
Consistently refreshed and 100% tailored content that improves search engine optimization (SEO) and, best of all, draws returning customers to find out what the next Q&A dialogue will be
Successful Q&A blogs are found all over the web and used by many of our successful Waterside authors, including Andy Rathbone (andyrathbone.com), who uses this format to respond to issues his audience encounters, and Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor.com), whose Q&A is the centerpiece of his author site’s landing page.
A number of Waterside author clients write fiction as well as nonfiction, and these same techniques cross over to the world of fiction author visibility also. Fiction writers can check out Tee Morris’ blog at teemorris.com, who writes science fiction, steampunk, and fantasy.
Collective blogs. Use power in numbers: authors with like interests have formed collective blogs, where various authors contribute to posting. Contributing to a collective site, authors are able to increase the size of their following by posting to their collective networks. This type of blog is fully loaded with content and is an announcement platform for upcoming dates, lectures, book releases, and schedules. One example is our author client Winslow Yerxa, who blogs at the collective site harmonicasessions.com.
Learn about Technorati (technorati.com), the search engine for rating blogs. It looks at SEO tags and the number of blogs that link to your blog to give you a blog rating. Technorati lists the top 100 blogs, a blog directory, instructions for submitting a guest blog, and much more.
Encourage Online Sharing with Your Blog
In their second edition of Blogging to Drive Business, author clients Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt show how to foster your readership community through online sharing in your blog, suggesting that readers can have a sense of ownership within your blog space. Rebecca’s blog (rebeccacoleman.ca) creates a sense of community by addressing customer interests stated in comments. The blog advantage is interactive content, so encourage a strong community to form around your posts. “In some cases Internet users will create groups, fan pages, or their own blogs dedicated to various products or services they like,” Rebecca says. “Opening up similar access and playgrounds for discussion in your own online space can work to your advantage … the community might not necessarily be an actual page, forum, or comments section, but you’ll find that your readers will become your blog’s evangelists.”
Encourage blog conversation starting with reading comments, respond to them in a way that continues the conversation beyond, and then allow and encourage readers to share your content with their own social networks. Ask what they think and what their communities think about an issue to solicit comments. Here are more blog sharing tips from Rebecca and Eric’s book:
To ensure tools are available, provide links and Share This buttons on your blog posts by using a service like AddThis. You can encourage readers to share your link through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit and through Facebook.
Use a plugin from Twitter such as Tweetmeme to abbreviate links for tweets.
When readers share your content on their blogs, they can just link back to your post; you can make that link visible from your site.
Remember that blogging is about public sharing that builds your author brand! Whenever your posts are shared, you win as the exposure for your author brand and your book increases along with your ability to be found.
In the last chapter, we told you why you need to have a home base on the web, a site to serve as the magnet for all your writing endeavors. When you’re just starting out, maybe you want to test the waters a little bit. See some proof of what we’re talking about without going to the trouble (and expense) of finding a web host and registering a domain. In this case, often the best solution is to set up a blog on a hosted site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress.com. These are places where you can publish articles every day at no cost to you. The advantage of these particular sites for writers is not just the simplicity of setup and maintenance, but also the ability to reach many people through the communities around the platform.
There are many places on the web that will host your blog site, but we recommend choosing one of the big players: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, or WordPress.com. Where you choose to place your blog is largely a matter of personal preference. These sites will all help you find your audience through SEO and an existing community of bloggers. They are easy to set up and maintain. All of them have mobile apps that allow you to connect to your blog and post from a smartphone or tablet. Perhaps the availability of your preferred address on a particular host will be a deciding factor.
In this section, we’ll show you the defining characteristics of three platforms: Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, and WordPress.
The idea behind Blogger is to give anyone a drop-dead simple way to have a blog. All the software you need to create and maintain a blog exists in your web browser, and you don’t have to install a thing. This has been true from Blogger’s beginnings as an independent website right around the dawn of the 21st century, through its acquisition by Google, straight through to today. It is also one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web.
Because Google owns Blogger, you can easily get yourself a Blogger account with your existing Google account. Blogger integration with other Google properties like YouTube and Google+ also offers several advantages:
Linking to YouTube videos in your posts is a snap! In the post editor, you can search for relevant videos or link to your YouTube channel.
You can automatically create a Google+ page for your blog that will share your posts with that audience, offering another way to interact with your readers.
Perhaps most importantly, you can use Google AdSense and include affiliate links to earn money with your blog.
The downside to Blogger is mostly about control. Unlike WordPress and Movable Type/TypePad, you can’t run Blogger as the blog page of your own site. You can link your existing domain to your Blogger site, but you should only do this if your site is just a blog. If, for example, you want to directly sell ebooks or other content, you can’t do that on Blogger, though you
