Note from Jane: This article was first published in 2012. Since that time, it has been regularly revised and expanded to ensure that it is as useful and relevant as possible for today’s authors.
Although this may seem like an unusual way to begin a blog article, my ultimate goal is to help you to avoid wasting time, effort, and frustration with blogging as an author.
For the majority of authors, blogging does not provide any significant benefits.
Blogging remains a popular topic of discussion among authors regarding its use as a marketing and promotional tool for authors and their books. Blogging can be an effective means of promoting books and authors – however, only under certain conditions. Most authors do not fulfill the requirements necessary to effectively blog. In this article, I will discuss the conditions that must be met by authors who wish to blog successfully, and in what ways blogging can be beneficial to an author and their books.
To be clear about what blogging means in this context: publishing content on a website that you own and manage – typically your author website. This does not mean writing blog posts for other websites or blogs.
The term blogging is somewhat out of date these days. It is most often used to refer to maintaining a personal website or online journal. However, in the context of this article, blogging refers to publishing valuable content on social media or search engines.
What It Takes to Become a Successful Blogger
If you consider blogging less important than writing books and other published work, you are unlikely to succeed with blogging. Despite the fact that blogging is less formal, requires less research, and targets online readers who use social media to share blog posts, blogging still requires the same degree of dedication and writing skills as writing a novel. Any skill takes a while to master, and many authors quit blogging before they get enough experience to understand how to blog effectively.
If you want to succeed with blogging in the long term, you must genuinely enjoy blogging and understand the differences between blogging and writing printed work.
Blogging content can often be repurposed for other forms of publications. For example, many of the blog posts I wrote have been transformed into my book: Publishing 101. There was significant editing involved to transform blog content into book content, but the fact that it is possible indicates the value of blog content.
Blogging Is Easier for Nonfiction Writers Than Novelists
Blogging is easier for nonfiction writers because they already have the knowledge to create valuable blog content. If they teach workshops or have to interact with numerous readers, they know what questions the readers have and what topics are of most interest to the readers. By understanding the interests of the blog’s audience, nonfiction writers have a great start in blogging to create a blog that meets the interests of their audience.
Novelists can create blogs. They can focus on the type of writing that they do best. However, unpublished fiction writers will find it challenging to draw in readers. Blog writers usually take some time to build up their reputation before they start receiving many readers. For nonfiction writers, blogging allows them to build up their reputation and then seek out publishing opportunities.
That is why blogging advice can be inconsistent. The best strategies depend on the type of writing that one does.
Consistency Is Essential for Successful Blogging
There are two important forms of consistency: publishing frequency and content focus.
Publishing Frequency means publishing 2 to 4 blog posts each week. Although it is possible to publish only one blog post each week, it will be more difficult to gain traction for your blog if you do not publish at least once each week. When you are just getting started with your blog, you should aim to publish several times each week. As your blog and its audience grow, you can always adjust your publishing frequency to a lower rate.
Content Focus means that the headlines of your blog posts should focus on conveying the message of your blog and its target audience. A prospective visitor should be able to instantly understand what your blog is about and whether its content will be valuable or enjoyable to read regularly.
Many bloggers fail to stay committed to their topic of discussion because they either find it boring themselves or assume that their readers will also find it boring. By constantly changing the topics that are discussed on the blog, writers make it difficult for audiences to form a connection with the content and to become loyal followers of the blog. Staying committed to a single topic is one of the keys to blogging success.
If you enjoy blogging but do not have the time to commit to blogging regularly, starting a blog together with other writers who share your genre will reduce the time you have to commit to blogging and allow your blog to reach a larger audience right from the start.
Building an Audience Requires Patience
If you are not already a well-known author in your field, it may take several months before people even discover your blog. While this may seem like you are doing something wrong, there is an overwhelming amount of content out there that people use to capture people’s attention.
However, if you commit to consistently publishing valuable content on the same topic over an extended period, people will eventually begin to recognize you. They will start to think to themselves, “Oh, this person writes about this topic quite regularly.” It is to this end that many authors ignore the fact that people do not notice when they publish new content on their blog.
Only a small percentage of people will comment on your blog – typically around 10% or less. This is why it may take some time before you begin to notice that your audience and engagement with your blog is growing.
What Should You Blog About?
The process typically looks something like this:
An author has a book that is either about to be published or who is trying to secure a publishing deal.
They have to promote their book.
They come across advice on how to do this: blog!
Then they ask themselves, what should I blog about?
My theory is that many authors struggle with blogging because they follow this very process.
So, how does one answer the question of what should I blog about?
If you cannot think of anything to blog about right now, blogging may not be the right career choice for you. The best bloggers usually start blogging because they have a love for the activity of blogging. Blogging should not feel forced or unnatural around your writing. The best bloggers have an abundance of ideas, far more than they have time to write them down.
That said, I want to encourage the kids out there who might be wondering if blog writing is for them.
While blog writing can take many different models, some are easier to establish than others. In fact, there are several different blogging models you can explore, depending on your level of difficulty with blogging in general.
The easiest of blogging models is what I refer to as the literary citizenship model. If you’re not very familiar with literary citizenship, I’ve written more about that idea in another article. Essentially, literary citizenship is about appreciating and celebrating authors and literary works that you personally enjoy. This blog writing model works best for those who write novels, memoirs, or poems that they have yet to publish.
Blogging with the intention of promoting literary citizenship presents blogging opportunities such as:
Publishing casual book recommendations and reviews.
Publishing Q&As or interviews with members of the writing community (typically authors).
Publishing “What I’m Reading Now” posts or other lists of the media you are consuming.
Benefits of these types of blogs include interacting with other writers in your community to build relationships and publish content online. All authors are happy to receive some attention or additional readers for their work.
The challenge exists in that literary citizenship is very common among writer communities online. To gain a significant number of followers on your blog, you will need a unique blogging perspective or approach – which will be required for the majority of blogging endeavors.
Easy-Medium: Write for Other Writers
This is the approach that I take. Many authors have knowledge and experience to share with others in the writing community. The audience for these writers is the enormous number of aspiring and experienced writers. The downside to only interacting with other writers is that your readership may be limited to those writers alone.
One of the benefits of writing for other writers is that if you teach writing or mentor other writers, you already have the material for your blog posts. You have a variety of blog post ideas when you start out, and your readers will share your blog posts on social media to promote your blog.
Where the challenge lies: burnout. After a few years, finding new ways to keep the content fresh and engaging for the audience becomes difficult. Additionally, as the readers grow and develop as individuals, they will eventually move beyond your blog.
Easy-Medium: Write in Your Area of Expertise
This is the ideal choice for anyone looking to write and publish nonfiction content. This is best for instructional or practical nonfiction content or memoir writing. For example, if you know your audience consists of individuals struggling with addiction or caring for their elderly parents, you can write content that helps them with these issues.
Pros include having an in-depth knowledge of your audience’s needs. This will allow you to produce content that will appeal to your audience members. Additionally, if you frequently give presentations or teach others on specific topics, you can use that material for your blog posts.
Where the challenge lies: Some of the topics are more competitive than others, such as travel and cooking. In these instances, extra effort will be required to find a unique perspective or voice for the discussion.
Medium: Behind the Scenes
Use this medium to talk about the research and news behind the creation of your books. Plan contests and activities that allow the readers to have a participation role in your projects, such as naming the characters of your novel or choosing the best book cover art. Readers will enjoy having insights into your projects and becoming a part of their development.
Key benefits: Discussing the ideas and experiences behind your writing is a great way to discover and connect with your readers.
Where the challenge lies: You might not have many topics to discuss, or you may not enjoy involving your readers in your writing process altogether. As a novelist who has yet to publish their novel, you might also struggle with this topic because your potential readers might not know your work or are interested in it.
Difficult: Personal Essays or Everyday Life
Many writers will find success sharing informal articles that discuss everyday events and their experiences. Additionally, writers can share specific types of media online that relate to the discussed topics.
Key benefits include the fact that blogging is a form of creative outlet for those who wish to blog regularly. Readers who like the writer’s content may appreciate the writer and their personal life (though some authors prefer to leave their personal lives to the mysterious world of writing).
The challenge with blogging about one’s life is that not all writers are able to write engaging content about their lives. For those writers who are not yet well known, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to inspire others to become interested in the writer’s life unless they are exceptionally talented writers.
Though not a complete list of the topics about which bloggers can write, these descriptions cover the most common types of blogs and blog topics.
It’s easier to say than to do, but there’s a special way to bring your own voice to the discussion on a particular topic. For me, it took 18 months of struggling and exploring blogs to finally find the correct niche for my blog – writing about business and digital media topics for authors.
The most successful blogs have a focused topic that they write about and create content for their specific audience. It’s much easier to get the attention of the right people when you tailor your blog to the interests of your audience members.
No One Should Blog in Isolation
Find the individuals who are already blogging in the same niche as your desired blog. Begin to read their blogs, comment on their posts, and share their posts. Eventually, ask if you can write a guest post for them to publish on their blog. See your bloggers as your fellow members of the same community who could potentially promote your blog. By curating quality content and encouraging the comment section, the other bloggers in your community will likely promote your blog or share it with their readers. So, find the important bloggers in your community and begin to build your relationship with them over time.
Choose the Right Blogging Platform
The best blogging platform is the one you use for your author website. Don’t use a separate platform to create your blog. Having your blog and your author website under one website will benefit your SEO and your marketing strategy in the long run. If your author website is using a platform like Squarespace, for instance, start your blog on that website instead of on WordPress or Blogspot.
If your author website platform does not have blogging features, it may be time for you to create a new author website that supports blogging functions. I discuss the basics of author websites in another guide.
If you do not have an author website yet, or if you are creating a multi-author blog, the best platform to use is WordPress. This platform is supported well by website creators around the world and it is the platform behind 20% of all websites in use today. My step-by-step guide to setting up your own website or blog will only take you 10-15 minutes to complete.
Before You Launch Your Blog
Keep the following points in mind before getting started.
Blog title and tagline. While there are no rules for blog titles, it should be immediately obvious to anyone browsing blogs what you are writing about and what they can expect from your blog. If your blog title is symbolic and does not allow people to immediately see the focus of your blog, then you should have a blog tagline that promotes your blog. Even individuals like Michael Hyatt who has become very well known in his field uses the tagline: Your Leadership Mentor.
Readability. If you plan on using your blog mainly for reading, do not change the readability of your blog. For starters, do not use text that is too small to read, text that is too closely spaced, or white text on a black background. Additionally, do not include too many advertisements as this can make it difficult for readers to focus on your blog and make them want to leave your blog.
About page or bio. If the readers enjoy your blog posts, they will want to know more about the writer. Include this information on the About page of your blog. Additionally, create a way for readers to contact you.
Comments. Decide whether to approve or publish comments. You can choose to approve every comment before it is published on your blog. Alternatively, comments can be published automatically unless they are spam comments. The best option is to allow comments without requiring readers to sign in to leave a comment. This will encourage more comments on your blog posts. However, ensure that you receive email notifications when someone comments on your blog to remove spam comments. Blogging platforms like WordPress make it easy to filter out spam comments. Additionally, wordpress has a commenting plugin called Akismet that will help filter spam comments automatically. Akismet is the most popular commenting plugin used by WordPress blogs.
How to Create Quality Posts That Get Read and Shared
Quality has a different meaning for a lot of people. The more in tune with your audience, the better will be your blog posts.
Here are a few ways to make your posts more engaging and shareable:
Don’t be afraid of writing long blog posts. Many people believe that the best blog posts will be 500 words or less. This is simply not true for search engine rankings as Google rewards blog posts that offer value to the reader and penalizes websites with thin content. Social media is better for short posts with quick thoughts and opinions on specific topics. The best blog posts on this site are over 2,000 words. However, long posts should also be easier to read, which brings us to the next idea.
Improve readability for skimmers. Most people will scan your content prior to deciding whether it’s going to be useful to you or not. If it is, then they will likely save it or continue reading until the end. To make your content more readable by skimmers, use subheadings, short paragraphs (preferably one-line paragraphs), and bullet points or numbered lists.
Include at least one image. You’ll notice that I always begin my posts with an image. Images inherently increase the perceived value of your content, which are automatically displayed when shared on social media platforms. The image does not have to be related to the content (although it can be symbolic of the content), but it must be visually appealing and contain a variety of colors. Blending in with the rest of your content is the last thing you want to do.
If you want people to respond to your blog post in the comments section, end your blog post with a question. This will encourage discussion in the comments section of your blog post, which will ultimately increase the amount of time people spend on your blog page – which is one of the factors that determines the search rankings of your blog posts in search engine results.
Your Blog Post Headlines Are Critical
If someone only saw your blog post’s headline – for example, on Twitter – would they click on your blog post? Your blog post’s headline is one of the first things that people will see when browsing the internet for your blog or when viewing the search engine search results for your blog posts. Thus, it is one of the most important factors regarding your blog posts’ click-through and read rates.
Consider the following:
- Is the headline clear and specific? There’s very little room for headlines to be clever or vague. It must be specific to the content of the article and contain keywords that will allow the article to be discovered through search engines.
- Is the headline interesting and thought-provoking? This does not mean that the headline should be click-bait. However, it should be interesting enough to make the reader click on the article to find out what the content is about. Click-bait happens when the headline fails to deliver the content that it promises within the headline.
- Does the headline provide a benefit? Readers have limited time and attention spans these days. The average reader will pass by several articles and only click on those that provide value for the reader. Therefore, the question that all readers ask of every article is: What’s in it for me?
Here are a few real examples of blog headlines that I helped improve for clarity and keyword optimization.
Total Randomness, Mostly Related To Books That Aren’t Mine became My Summer Reading List: Books I’ve Loved (and Books Still Waiting)
Turn, Turn, Turn became What If You’re Dreading the Change of Seasons?
Wanna Have Coffee? became Overcoming the Obstacles That Prevent You From Meditating
Create Cornerstone Content
The cornerstone content for your business is the content that will draw new readers to your site. This type of content is typically created as a detailed discussion of the most common questions, the problems that your audience faces most often, or the most popular authors and topics in your field.
The cornerstone content that will appear under the “Most Popular Posts” section of the blog will be links to one of the 101 posts I have written about getting published.
In some cases, the cornerstone content will be a manifesto or a downloadable PDF document. An example of such a document is 279 Days to Overnight Success by Chris Guillebeau, which attracted thousands of readers (maybe even millions) to his blog and his message.
For nonfiction writers looking to create cornerstone content, the best way to do it is to create a 101 guide, a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document, or a tutorial on a subject or area of expertise that the writer knows best. My most visited resource is Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published.
If you’re a novelist, you’ll need to think a little more creatively. For example:
- If your book has any connection with a region, create a local guide or travel guide to the region.
- Explore other themes from your novel such as recipe collections, books, movies and music that your character loves, or the research required to write the novel.
- Create reading lists. Include books in the same genres as your novels, books that match the mood of your novels, or books that are best read on specific occasions. Include books that are similar to your novels or to current trends in publishing, such as if you write romance novels but your readers love The Bachelor, include some books in your reading list that your fans might also like.
- If you have any hobbies or careers outside of novel writing, create FAQ guides for them for fans of your novels.
Having any of these cornerstone blogs will significantly reduce the effort required to attract readers to your blog through the publication of new articles. If you have any of these blogs go online, they will continue to bring new visitors to your website over several months as loyal readers.
If you’re planning on blogging seriously, read the article on How to Increase Website Traffic.
Make It Easy to Browse and Share Your Posts
Some blogs have a minimal design that makes it hard for visitors to understand what exactly they offer. While minimal designs have their advantages, including a sidebar with blog history and hundreds of published articles receives better engagement from readers.
Include a calendar or archive so readers can explore your blog for older posts.
Organize your blog into 5-10 categories of the most relevant topics. For example, if a reader likes interview posts, they may want to browse other posts that are also interview-based. Organizing your blog makes it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.
Include a most popular posts section to help new blog visitors explore your most popular posts right away.
Sharing features.
Make it easy for readers to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Most blogging platforms automatically include this feature for you.
Improve Your Content’s Visibility Through Search Engines (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) deserves its own article. However, as you’re probably already doing some of the following to optimize your website for search engines:
Use a website platform like WordPress or Squarespace, which are search-engine friendly by default.
Ensure that each of your blog posts is appropriately categorized and tagged.
Include the keywords that reflect the terms that your readers will use when searching for content like yours in your blog post titles and throughout your content. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, install the Yoast SEO plugin to help optimize your content for search engines.
If your website is self-hosted, you should also install Google Analytics. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to start using Google Analytics for your website today – it’s free and will give you valuable insights into your visitors and their interests. Once you have collected at least one month’s worth of data, review the following questions:
Where are your visitors finding your blog?
What search terms are sending visitors to your website?
Which pages and blog posts on your website are getting the most visits?
With these answers to these questions, you’ll be able to make informed decisions regarding which social media platforms to use to promote your blog, which other websites to partner with to increase your traffic, and which blog posts to continue to publish that receive the most visits from readers over time.
Create Lists or Roundups Regularly
Another of the best ways to introduce people to your blog is through linking to other blogs. Creating links to other blogs ensures that everyone benefits – from you and your readers to the other blog websites that receive traffic from your blog.
In the writing and publishing world, it’s very common for blogs to create link roundups on a weekly basis. For example, Elizabeth Craig writes link roundups for her blog. Many blogs will create lists or roundups about the topics that they are most interested in and passionate about. These blogs will continue to write these links and roundups for at least six months to a year before considering a change in content for the blog.
Conduct Regular Interviews With People Who Inspire You
It may surprise you how uncommon it is to find an interviewer who is knowledgeable about the topic they are interviewing and who has prepared for the interview in advance.
Consider the themes and ideas or unique angles for your website interview series and publish interviews with individuals who inspire you in your blog posts and content. These interview series provide an excellent opportunity to expand your network and to connect with others in your community.
Be a Guest on Other Websites
If you feature on another website, you will receive multiple links to your website and social media profiles.
Seek out websites with a larger audience than your own but that feature individuals whose readers are a good match for the content you publish. For an excellent introduction to the world of guest blogging, be sure to check out the guide from Copyblogger. If you are not enthusiastic about publishing guest content on your own blogs, consider reaching out to other bloggers to appear on their interview series.
Whenever you are featured on another website, share the interview on your social media channels and include a link to your website where the interview is published as a permanent link.
Conclusion
Building a successful multi-location SEO strategy is more than creating separate pages for different cities—it’s about establishing a scalable system that helps every location rank independently while maintaining a consistent brand presence. From keyword mapping and optimized location pages to Google Business Profiles, local citations, customer reviews, structured data, and AI-ready content, every element contributes to stronger local visibility. Strong multi-location SEO relies on scalable systems, optimized location pages, and consistent local signals to improve rankings and grow visibility across every market.
As your business expands into new markets, standardized processes and automation become essential for maintaining quality and efficiency. By following the strategies outlined in this guide, you can improve local search rankings, attract more qualified customers, increase conversions, and create long-term, sustainable growth across every location you serve. Whether you manage five locations or hundreds, a well-planned multi-location SEO strategy will help your business compete and succeed in every market.
