Posts tagged blogging

The Virtual Book Tour and The Blogger

Feb23
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Mike Webb

You may or may not have heard of a “Virtual Book Tour” and you may not even care.

But here is an explanation of what a virtual book tour is, why you should do it and how you should do it.

The Blog part of a Virtual Book Tour

A Virtual Book Tour really consists of anything that you can do online to promote you and your book. For example: Blog tour, online video interviews, podcasts, webinars, articles etc… but for now I am going to talk about blog tours. We will get to the others in future posts.

A blog tour is set up with the intention of introducing authors and their books to as many people as possible at or around the same time by utilizing bloggers who either review the book or interview the author about their book. The benefit of a virtual book tour for the author of course is exposure to people who already have an interest in books and want to read about the latest and greatest book. The benefit of a virtual book tour to the blogger, interviewer or reviewer is the great content that they are providing to their readers, which not only keeps them coming back but hopefully makes them want to share the bloggers post with others which in turn brings more readers to the blog.

Will a Virtual Book Tour lead to sales

Authors should pay attention to and look for opportunities to do a virtual book tour as often as possible. Why? Because what else could you do that could put you in front of potentially tens of thousands of potential readers all at nearly the same time for so little time and money? Think about it… if you have 10 to 20 bloggers participating in your virtual book tour that will either review your book or do an interview with you all in the same 30 day period that each have 500 to 5,000 readers then that turns into 5,000 to 100,000 readers that will learn about you and your book. How many of those will click on the amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com link that you have provided to your new best friend blogger? Probably quite a few. This not only sells books for you but it also increases your ranking on the sites but it also increases your search engine ranking.

And remember that most if not all of these bloggers will have Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms that they participate where they will most likely notify all of their followers there that they have just posted something about your book on their blog.  The desired result of your virtual blog tour is to create a lot of buzz about your book in a relatively tight time frame.

Steps to take to set up a Virtual Blog Tour

The first thing you need to do is start finding bloggers who may have an interest in working with you on your virtual book tour. You will want to not only search for bloggers that blog about books, you will want to find as many of them that like your particular genre. This will intensify your potential since their readers are most likely interested in your genre as well.

Next you will want to have all of the informatin that bloggers will need for your virtual book tour ready and available to them via email. This should include the following items:

  • A brief introduction to your book
  • A jpeg or other type of file of the cover of your book
  • The same for a picture of you
  • An electronic copy of your book or a hard copy if they prefer
  • An established time frame for your virtual book tour – usually 2 to 4 weeks in length
  • Sample interview questions for the bloggers who want to interview the author as part of the virtual book tour
  • Links to your amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or other sales page for the book
  • 2-3 articles that the blogger can use as a guest post from the author – include your embeded links in the word document.
  • Give away copies of the book for your new virtual book tour friend to give away to their readers as part of a contest or other promotion

Of course there are many other things you should be doing other than a virtual book tour to promote yourself and your book and you should definitely be doing several of them. A virtual book tour is one of the places I would start first.

If you are an author or publisher and think you might be interested in participating in a virtual book tour then you should visit http://submissions.authorblogtours.com to see how they can help you with your virtual book tour.

Posted in Authority Status, Blogging, Book Marketing, Book Release, Book Review, Selling Books, Virtual Book Tour - Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Part #4 Blogging in 20 minutes or less

Aug05
2010 Leave a Comment Written by Mike Webb

Step 4: Give yourself a time limit 

As I said before, you will see on my blog that there has been quite a bit of time elapse between some of my blog posts. This is because I would sometimes sit down and start writing and I would find myself taking hours to get something written. So the next time I needed to write a post I would remember how long it took the last time and I would tell myself that I didn’t have time to do it. This would go on for several days or even weeks before I felt I had the time to do it again. What a waste of a good blog and several ideas that I had failed to write down. 

And then there were times when I would start writing and not be completely satisfied with what I had come up with and so rather than the post not be “perfect” I would post nothing at all. We are all human and frankly I would rather spend my time reading from or listening to or watching a video from someone who is real and that has great information than I would trying to pick out some imperfection on their blog. Now mind you as a publisher I have a tendency to notice misspelled words so I am not suggesting that you just type something out and post it. It should be proofed and any obvious changes made but don’t kill your brain cells trying to create the perfect post.

Part #5 is the last in this series and it is coming soon. Just sign up for my RSS and you will be notified when it is posted.

Posted in Authority Status, Blogging, Brand Strategy - Tagged , , , , , , ,

Blogging in 20 minutes or less Part # 2

Aug01
2010 Leave a Comment Written by Mike Webb

Step 2: Build a list of headlines 

Headlines should grab attention. If yours don’t then your posts won’t get read no matter what you do to get people to your blog. So build a list of at least 50 attention grabbers that are relevant to your business, service or niche and you will save a ton of valuable time. You can pick four to six key topics that you deal with and then come up with as many sub topics as you can in each of those. A catchy headline can make all the difference in whether or not your visitors stick around so be sure it’s doing the job it’s supposed to. 

Here are some ideas of areas that you can build your headline list around: 

Statistics 

For example you can grab attention with the following: 

  • 400,000 books in a single year
  • 1 billion tweets every day 

Thought Provoking Questions 

Ask your readers a question that they will find curious or want to know that answer to themselves. 

For example: 

  • Does your marketing stink?
  • How do you demand attention?
  • When is the last time you had a heart to heart with yourself? 

All of these create a curiosity in your reader’s mind that makes them want to read more. Do this and your blog posts will keep eyes on your page. 

Tell a story 

If you can tell a good story then you can capture the attention of your readers. Not a long story but just long enough to get whatever point across that you want to make. It could be the story of one of your clients and how you helped them. Or it could be just a make believe story that tells the ending that you want and that illustrates how you can help someone or provide a service that they have been in need of. But remember you will still need a compelling title for your story. 

Relevant Quotes 

Have probably seen quotes used along side chapter heading in books that are relevant to the chapter itself. This is a good method to use and a quote can be used as the headline itself. For example: 

In the book “Tactical Entrepreneur” by Brian Hazlegren (one of my authors at Sortis Publishing by the way) the second chapter is titled “Do You Have What It Takes?” he quotes himself by saying the following:

 “If a man cannot dream he will soon be asleep to all the important things that life has to offer. If a man cannot pray he will soon only listen to himself. And if he has no charity for others he will soon be the only important thing in his pathetic existence.” – Brian Hazelgren 

He then proceeds to write a great chapter all about the courage needed to start a small business. The quote really gets you thinking about what it is that Brian is about to discuss in the chapter. That is powerful and it’s a fantastic way to capture attention and help drive the point home.

Part #3 is coming soon. Sign up for my RSS feed to be notified.

Posted in Authority Status, Blogging, Book Marketing, Brand Strategy, Competitive Positioning, Messaging, Publishing, Writing, social media - Tagged , , ,

Mike Webb

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