How authors can reach out with a blog
Editors and literary agents often talk about an author’s “platform” and the “target audience” for a book — they want to know who and how far the book will reach, (with “reach” meaning “sell,” of course). Blogs are sort of similar. And since a lot of authors blog these days — and a lot more are thinking of blogging — I thought I’d look at how to reach out with a blog.
You could say there are two aspects of reaching out with a blog: finding an audience and having the audience find you.
Finding an audience
Last week, PR Squared posted a piece about audience targeting in social media. They broke down web users into three groups: Passionates, Influencers and Ad-Hocs (the idea being that you probably can’t reach everyone early and immediately, so you might as well know who to go after first). PR guru Ronn Torossian also weighed in last week on influencers.
Having the audience find you
The other part of blogging is making sure people can find you. The technical term for that is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but that makes my head swim, so I’m going to highlight just one aspect of SEO: anchor text (the text of which a hyperlink is composed). Maw Books explains further in Linking Best Practices and Anchor Text and The Blog Herald also shows why anchor text is important.
It isn’t enough to simply write a blog post — that’s the equivalent of the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. So how do you get folks to the forest?
The Book Publicity Blog 
Great advice. I know from experience how important having a platform is…my SEO blog and book website are the primary vehicles for selling my book.
Great article! I am amazed at the number of authors, particularly self-published ones, who don’t have a blog or web site.
Thanks for this. The concept of anchor text is new to me, but now I see how important it is to use it for more than just a pointer. Great, useful blog by the way.
Yen, maybe you can do a post on resources authors need to construct websites? Capable, reasonably priced firms and site builders? What’s minimally needed to virtually represent a title in terms of pages, content, and updates? Might be worth an individual post. – Ann