Perhaps one of the best ways to bring potential readers to your website is by blogging. With a blog, you’ll be providing a lot of fresh information on a variety of topics related to your book, increasing the chances that someone will stumble across your writing and then head to your website.

We’ll get more into the value of writing a blog and how to write such an entry in a future article. For now, let’s focus on constructing this page on your website.

First, you don’t have to stick with your website host to create a blog. Almost every website host offers such blogging pages, but they tend to have a number of problems with them. First and foremost, many of them are clunky to use compared to outside blog providers. Further, many prohibit advertisements that aren’t offered by their partners. One way a blogger can pick up a little extra cash is to post ads from Amazon.com or via Google AdSense that relate to their entries, and you don’t want to limit yourself. Finally, not all website hosts offer the greatest customer service. They may be fine for hosting a static website you’ve built, but if you’re going to work with the website every day or two, you need to have customer service and IT support that quickly responds to you needs.

Running your blog on another site (for example, I use Typepad and Blogger for my blogs though my websites are hosted by WordPress), is easy enough – all you have to do is ensure that navigation links on both sites take you to the other. The one downside is that your blog’s format won’t look much like your website, but that also can work to your advantage. Since your blog will be in front of a lot of people, you probably want to make it look a little flashier than your website anyway. To compare, here’s my “Hikes with Tykes” blog using my website host’s template and here’s my “Hikes with Tykes” blog using Blogger. 

Give your blog the same name as your website, though. Also, construct it with some similarities, so that readers can quickly make the connection between the blog and your website. For example, I’ve placed a picture of my book’s cover at the top of the far right column next to my text on both my blog and website.

Below the book cover on your blog, include a description of your book. This might be the same description you used on your website’s home page.

Also include a picture of yourself on your blog as well a bio. This can appear below the picture and description of your book in the right column. The bio can be the same text you used on your website’s About the Author page.

A blog is much easier to set up then you imagine. Most providers offer tutorials to take you through the process step-by-step. The first time I set up a blog, way back in 2003, I spent about four hours constructing the site, and that mainly involved seeing what different templates looked like and what each option did. The last blog I started, in 2012, took me a half-hour to set up.