When my first book came out I was excited and ready to go gangbusters on marketing it. I hired a web designed and put together a beautiful website themed around the book and taking its visual cues from the cover design. I started a Twitter feed specifically about my book. I even invested in letterhead that included a small image of the book’s cover. I was so proud of my marketing efforts.

There were a couple of problems, though. A nice website isn’t enough to generate book sales. And when my second book came out, it rendered that beautiful website pretty much useless. I’ve learned a lot about book marketing since then and now I realize some of the most effective book marketing techniques include blogging, becoming a regular guest on podcasts related to your topic, and investing in advertising with BookBub.

Why should you blog as a tactic for book marketing?

Blogging falls into the category of your content marketing. And just for fun, here are some compelling statistics about the success of content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute:[1]

• Content marketing gets three times more leads per dollar spent than paid search
• Content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as outbound marketing, and it costs 62% less
• The number of ads people see on an average day increased from 2,000/day in 1984 to about 5,000/day in 2014, giving rise to a massive use of ad blockers to weed out the noise. Content is rarely, if ever, blocked
• Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without
  61%of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase after reading recommendations on a blog
• Content marketing has a conversion rate that is six times higher than most other methods of marketing.
• Content creation is the most effective Search Engine Optimization technique

There are a host of other surveys out there indicating that a huge amount of business transacted today involves the internet in some fashion, and it all underscores the fact that your content—and specifically your blog—is an opportunity to personalize those transactions, to bring a human element into what is otherwise a highly technical arena.

Blogging and your book

Your blogging efforts gives you and your book a bigger online footprint than you might otherwise generate. It should also:

• Allow people to find out more about you
• Help people see what kind of a person you are
• Show your target readers who you are and what you can do
• Help educate people about how to improve their own businesses or lives and
• Increase your credibility

If you do this well, human visitors and search engines will reward your efforts and you will generate greater book sales as a result.

It makes sense that you might want to develop a strong presence online if you want to build your readership.

There are other methods of online marketing that have a place in an author’s marketing matrix, including paid search and pay-per-click campaigns and website development projects that include conversion strategies.

Strong content that positions you as the hands-down choice for the readers you are here to serve, however, will give you a huge advantage when it comes to increasing your book sales. And a blog is one of the most effective ways to create content.

[1] http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/stats-invest-content-marketing/

Awakening Author Blogs