A great way to promote your book is by guest blogging, which is writing, for free, content that appears on another person’s blog. It’s sort of like being a guest host of a television program.
Most bloggers are more than happy to post your guest blog, as it reduces their workload and gets other readers (specifically those who follow you social media, because you’ll promote your guest blog) to take a look at their site. Some may ask that they have the opportunity to guest blog on your site in an exchange.
Guest blogging is a natural promotion tool for authors of nonfiction books. Simply write about topics that your book(s) address – bonus points if you can connect them to what’s current in the news or industry. Novelists, short story writers and poets also can find material to pen, though. It might involve tips for writing in your genre, self-publishing or promoting your book, or a nonfiction article about a topic that plays an important role in your book (such as creating a scientifically-plausible FTL device if you wrote a space opera novel).
Get started by listing a dozen or so blogs related to your book’s topic. For example, if you wrote a book about day hiking with children, blogs about hiking and parenting would work.
Next, make a list of a half-dozen or so topics that you might write about for those blogs. Make sure that those topics haven’t been covered in at least six months to a year on those blogs (And even then, that may be too soon for a blogger to post about it.).
Contact each of the blog owners via email to see if they would be interested in your guest blog. Include your list of topics with the email and ask which one they would prefer.
If they give you a green light on a topic, cross it off your list and get to writing the blog. Make sure you follow their blog rules for length and format. Also, don’t go heavy on plugging your book in the article; you can mention your book but always do so in relation to your topic, which should be the focus of the blog. You might even save the book mention for the blurb about who you are that appears at the end of the blog.
Note that you didn’t pen the blog until after the idea was accepted. Don’t waste your time writing a guest blog that never gets accepted, unless you can, of course, post it on your own blog later. In any case, you want to tailor your blog to the guest blogger’s readership, and you can’t do that until you know who you’re writing for.
Also, write a unique blog for each site. Most bloggers don’t want to run something that appeared elsewhere and likely will reject your article if you submit it (or be very upset with you if finding out afterward that it ran elsewhere).
Always promote your guest blog on your various social media. Don’t worry about this driving away readers from your blog. In fact, it’ll do the opposite. Readers will hold you in higher esteem if you’re guest blogging. The guest blog site owner also will appreciate your efforts and likely invite you to write another article.
Limit the number of a guest blog posts to any one site, however. As the number of readers at most blogs rotates slowly, any more than a single guest post a year at just means you’re hitting the same potential buyers of your book who already had the opportunity to make a purchase.
______________
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.