Is A Blog Necessary For Author Marketing And Business Book Promotion?

By Author: Melissa Henderson
Total Articles: 3
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Author marketing experts will answer “yes” to this question every time. A blog serves several important functions in the overall marketing campaign. It’s not just a place where the writer – or the publicity agency, if the writer has hired one – will talk about the new book. It’s also a place that can become very search engine friendly, if handled correctly, and lead readers to the connected website and into the sales process.

Whether it’s business book promotion or widget sales, Google and the major search engines love to see fresh, relevant content on a website. (Although we differentiate between “website” and “blog,” search engines do not.) Until blogs came into fashion, anyone with a website faced a quandary: How to keep putting content on a website that already has all the content it needs.

Blogging has solved that problem. In book promotion, the author or his or her publicity firm can make sure new posts are going up on an appropriate schedule. Because these posts aren’t actual website pages – such as Home, About, Books, History, etc. – a wide ...
... variety of topics can be covered without sludging up the streamlined navigation of the main website.

Authors can write blog posts about their books, how and where they learned to write, the art of writing, the passion of writing, writing pitfalls, other books they’ve read and liked and just about anything else. What is the point of all this?

Traffic.

Relevant content that is always being added to has a far better chance of attracting the search engines – and thereby visitors – than a static website that hasn’t been updated for months or longer. Of course there’s more to what is known as “search engine optimization” than just relevant, growing content, but this is a big part of it. Online promotion efforts also focus on elements such as the actual design, a reduced use of HTML, meta tags, post titles, navigation, text headings and the like.

Author marketing professionals typically have the resources to perform excellent design and optimization work for their clients. They also have the expertise to create the kind of website, to which the writer’s blog readers will be sent, that has a powerful sales message, written and formatted in a way that has been proven to be effective.

So, does a writer need a blog when doing author marketing? The answer to that question today is like the answer a few years ago to the question, “Does a company need a website?” An author needs every tool he or she can get in order to win in the highly competitive book-sales market. This is why so many turn to professional book publicists who have taken many authors down the road to success and who understand the inner workings of the publicity game and the book industry itself.

Melissa Henderson is a freelancer writer of Smith Publicity, a professional firm that provides author marketing and book promotion services. If you are also interested in finding out more about self published books you can visit their website.