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Julien Smith on Differentiating Your Blog and Your Writing

January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As my last interview in January, a month focused on how to build a better blog so you and your blogged book could more easily get noticed by readers and publishers, I interviewed Julien Smith, a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust and The Flinch. He discussed how blogging and publishing allow risk-taking writers ready to genuinely and candidly reveal themselves an opportunity to create change. Julian’s blog is a must read, as is his latest book, The Flinch, which he published as an ebook with Seth Godin’s Domino Project.

While some people who come to this blog wonder about the concept of blogging a book and giving away all that precious content for free, obviously, Julien supports the idea of giving away content. You can learn more about his free ebook and about his thoughts on writing tomorrow in another part of this interview, which will appear on Write Nonfiction NOW! Today, you’re going to find out what he has to say about doing so with a blog—and making an impact while you do so.

Julien is a consultant and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over fifteen years, from early BBSs and flash mobs to social web as we know it today. He also was one of the first Twitter users and one of the first people to podcast in 2004 (which is impressive to me since I’ve just struggled to get my first podcast up). He has worked with numerous media publications, such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBS, Cosmopolitan, and more.

All Julian’s accomplishments simply give you an inkling of the fact that he has a lot to say, and what he has to say is extremely insightful. It’s no wonder, therefore, that what he writes gets attention—like his latest book. I interviewed him just after reading The Flinch.  I would describe it as a book about moving through fear, but he says it’s “about our pathological lack of courage as individuals…really it’s a book about how to break out of bad habits and break into good ones.”

Thus, it’s a book about creating change—about asking people to change, compelling them to change. In that way, Julien is a change agent. And I think any blogger or aspiring author blogging their book also has the opportunity to be a change agent. Thus, we discussed that topic during our conversation, which you’ll find below. I hope you’ll check out the rest of the conversation here tomorrow. And I’ll have a third part of our conversation, this one on moving through fear and being a change agent, published on my other blog (Yes, I have yet another.), As the Spirit Moves Me, on Friday or Saturday.

Books, such as your book, The Flinch, are published and affect a lot of people. They affect change. Can you do the same with a blog? Can you be a change agent?

Absolutely. My blog has reached many people. Some of the articles that I’ve written have been read hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of times. Some of them have been repurposed into Cosmopolitan magazine, for example, to millions of readers. When I look at that, I feel like ‘free’ is the space in which someone plays and experiments with risk in their writing. And there is almost no downside. You can publish something, and the worst is thing that happens is obscurity. The worst thing that happens is that nobody reads it. If you’re at the beginning of your career, no one’s reading you anyway. But the upside is massive if you create something cool. So that requires risk, and a blog is the place in which you play with that.

How can a blogger or writer be the kind of a change agent, that kind of a thought leader, that impacts change via a blog?

No matter how different you think you may be, there’s probably a field of people that blog in the same space as you are. There’s this amazing book about the idea of differentiation, which is called Blue Ocean Strategy—very good book, over two million copies have been sold—and it’s about how to differentiate yourself from your competitors and create what’s called a ‘blue ocean’ instead of a red ocean. The red ocean, the metaphor is that’s where the sharks are, and there’s lots of blood and lots of competition for the same food. But a blue ocean has no sharks and, therefore, you can eat as much as you like, right? The blue ocean is created through vast differentiation and sort of radically removing a certain section of what it is that your competitors might do but that you do not.

Cirque du Soleil is a great example of this that they use in the book actually. Most traditional circuses involve smelly animals and clowns and other things like that. The price of a circus is cheap and so on. [Cirque du Soleil] says, ‘Well, how can we call ourselves a circus but remove the things that we consider not significant, and then turn it into a kind of theatre? It’s still a circus, but it kind of redefines what a circus is.’ From that point on, it creates a blue ocean.

Then comes the process of other people trying to compete and trying to copy them, and enlarging that space.

Can you offer a tip you use to create the type of blog posts that get the readership you talked about earlier?

One of the most influential, powerful things is to actually be candid. You have a bunch of interior walls, and you don’t even know that you have them…Some of my friends at Harvard Business Review created a trust equation one time, which we wrote about in Trust Agents. One of the most powerful aspects of the trust equation is intimacy, how close someone feels to you. While you have these walls up, people do not feel close to you, they may not know why. Then all of a sudden if you break them down, they immediately feel like, ‘Oh, this guy is something different, something special.’

One of the best examples of this currently going on is this guy called James Altucher, and he sold a company recently called StockPickr.com, and he went on to be in blogging. He just blogs his face off, like his entire life is in view, and the amount of audience it picks up as a result of that is amazing. It’s also because he’s good and smart and insightful and all these things. But it requires differentiation through making the audience feel like they’re close to you, and that’s what he does.

So basically, get really personal.

That’s a simplification of what I’m trying to express. More than that it’s really that you need to figure out what it is that people truly want to hear from you, and then actually give it to them. Lots of people feel like they anticipate what the audience needs, or they do things like that. They’re like, ‘Oh, my stuff isn’t working.’ Genuinely when something comes from a truly deep place, it tends to hit people in a deep place as well. Then when you try to artificially create something like that, and say, ‘Well, why isn’t this working?’ it isn’t effective because it isn’t actually true.

So it’s making that emotional connection.

Right.

Writers in general, not necessarily bloggers, then have a unique position to become change agents, wouldn’t you say?

People read more than they ever have in the history of mankind right now, you know? They read on mobile devices sixteen hours a day, or on computers for their entire waking hours. To me, yeah, it’s the best time to be a writer ever because what you do affects more people than it ever could have.

What tips could you offer to aspiring authors who may be blogging to build platform or blogging their books that would help them get noticed in the blogosphere.

I think that writing and getting noticed are two separate things, but I would say largely it’s a matter of refining ideas. You can go and talk about your anxiety or whatever, but it’s another thing entirely to call it ‘the flinch,’ to give something a name, for example, or to refine the idea to the point where it’s like, metaphorically sharp and it can just insert itself like a sword right into the person’s mind.

And then there’s the idea of platform, which is to sort of work on a platform and build the reach.

Then, finally, there’s the idea of the network, which is what happens behind the scenes—being able to connect to the right people in order to be able to get your work out there.

I would say that these three ideas, the idea itself, the platform and the network, are probably the three things that anyone should be working on who has any kind of media they want to be putting out, whether it’s writing or videos or whatever. If they’re not working on those three things at any given time, then they’re wasting their time.

I’m not sure most writers or bloggers focus on the differentiation offered by Julian in this last answer. It’s an important point for success as any type of author.

Check back tomorrow here for more of my interview with Julien. Learn the value of “free,” get insight into his writing practice and more. Check in here, later in the week for a discussion about The Flinch, fear and creating change.

What do you think about what Julien had to say? Are you ready to differentiate yourself in the blogosphere or be a change agent? are you ready to move through your defenses and write on a new level? Leave your comments and thoughts below!

Don’t forget about my upcoming “Blog Your Way to a Book Deal” 4-part Teleclass starting next week!  Preorder a copy of How to Blog a Book and SAVE $30 on the registration fee! Get all the details here: http://bit.ly/BlogaBookTeleclassOffer


Filed Under: Building a Better Blog Tagged With: , , ,

Jonathan Fields on Blog Traffic, Subscribers and Content

January 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

Yesterday I published a blog post on my other blog, Write Nonfiction NOW!, based on a very interesting interview I conducted with Jonathan Fields. In that post, Jonathan and I discussed what it takes to create a bestselling book: author’s platform, a business model, hard work, great release strategies, and a great book. (You can read the post here.) Today on this blog, I’ve published the remainder of our conversation, which covered tips for bringing in blog traffic, getting blog readers to subscribe to your blog and creating a better blog.

Jonathan is the author of  Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love, which was named a Top 10 Small Biz Book by Small Business Trends, and Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, his latest book, which has generated extraordinary praise for its provocative, science-meets-art approach to embracing uncertainty as a catalyst for innovation and action. It’s a must read for authors—yes, even authors of blogged books! I wrote a short review yesterday, but it bears repeating for those of you blogging with the hope that your book will be discovered in the process. All writers feel uncertainty, and that can stop us in our tracks. When you have no readers—or few readers—to your blog, when you aren’t sure if what you are writing makes sense, has meaning, is touching anyone—or ever will be purchased by a publisher or readers, it’s hard to keep moving forward. That’s why you want to read Jonathan’s book, Uncertainty. There you will find advice on how to make the uncertainty we all feel at times less unpleasant and to use it as a way to fuel your creative process.

Jonathan, a dad, husband, author, speaker and serial-entrepreneur, blogs at JonathanFields.com. Check out his blog if you want  a taste of a successful blog. He’s been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes, USA Today, People, CNBC, FoxBusiness, Vogue, Elle, Self, Fitness, Outside, O Magazine and thousands of other places. He also runs a book marketing educational venture TribalAuthor.com, where he shares what he has learned about marketing his books and becoming a successful author. (He shared a ton of great info on this topic in yesterday’s post.)

What follows is our conversation on blogging. Enjoy and learn!

For those authors who are beginning to blog, blogging a book or wanting to improve their blogs, can you offer a few tips for bringing in more traffic?

Bringing in more traffic…that’s an interesting question, because a lot of traffic is moving away from blogs these days and towards social media. There’s so much attention getting split. I would say leverage Twitter to build relationships. Where you can, share links to your blog. Make sure that when you share links, it’s both a much smaller part of everything else that you do, so you should be 90 percent other-serving, and 10 percent or less self-serving. Same thing with Facebook, but when you do it in Facebook, you can have more of a conversation. So share a link to a post, but then you can also put in content. Share a paragraph or two from the post, and then ask a question that will inspire a conversation in the comments on Facebook. Sometimes this defeats the comments in your blog, but…

Other ways to drive traffic are to create what we call “flagship content.” Create a major thought piece that’s provocative and establishes a position and a strong voice and builds leadership that people will want to share. It can be a series. It can be a long blog post. It can be a manifesto. We actually used a manifesto to launch Career Renegade.

It was called The Firefly Manifesto and was a PDF.

And once the readers show up, how do we get them to actually subscribe to the blog?

One, offer them something in exchange for their e-mail. That may be a mini-course or an eBook or a teaser chapter from a book. Feature the call to action to subscribe boldly, either at the top of your blog, the top right, or underneath your blog posts.

Second, ask them at the end of your blog post to subscribe. Throw in a sentence that says, “If you’ve enjoyed this…” or some variation of “if you’ve enjoyed this post, sign up for the weekly updates,” or whatever works for your format.

Any other tips you might want to add on blogging well?

I can go way down the rabbit hole with this. Just because you know how to use the technology doesn’t mean you have something to say. Blog because you have something to say, not because you have a place to say it.

One of the questions I get all the time is, “I’ve been blogging for six months, and nobody’s listening.” And I’ll look at the blog, and I’ll realize It’s because the person’s not saying anything. It’s like white-washed content, or there’s no voice, no position, no story, no value. If you’re going to put in the effort, have something to say, offer real value, tell great stories, be provocative (if that’s in your nature), have a voice. Give people something to say “yes” or “no” to. If you don’t, nobody will care.

Take Jonathan’s last comment to heart. It is especially true for book bloggers. Why would anyone want to read your blogged book if you have no voice, nothing to say, aren’t adding any value to anyone’s life, have no story to tell that touches people in some important or deep way? Write a book, blog a book, that matters–that’s worth reading.

Comments or questions about this post? Leave them below! I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Don’t forget about my upcoming “Blog Your Way to a Book Deal” 4-part Teleclass starting next week!  Preorder a copy of How to Blog a Book and SAVE $30 on registration fee! Get all the details here: http://bit.ly/BlogaBookTeleclassOffer

 

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Increasing Traffic, Publicizing Your Blog Tagged With: , , ,

Liz Strauss’ on How to Get Readers to Comment on Your Posts

January 19, 2012 By 3 Comments

Engagement. That’s what every blogger seeks—or should seek. If your blog readers comment on your posts, it means they not only read but get involved in what you write—involved enough to actually have a conversation with you. The blog stops being a one way broadcast, like a printed book, and becomes a conversation. Most bloggers would say that’s a true blog, one that engages the reader to do more than simply read what you wrote.

As a book blogger, you also want your readers to comment. Your blog represents a test marketed version of your book. Every time you publish a post, the comments your readers leave offer you valuable feedback you can use to improve your manuscript and make it more readable and marketable. Your blog readers serve as the best critique group you could ever find because they are the actual people who will buy your book. You want to engage them.

Assuming you have blog readers, how do you do you get them to comment? I asked Liz Strauss, the Queen of Comments, that question at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in November 2011.  At that time, Liz, who is a strategist, CEO and founder of  SOBCon, and keynote speaker, had over 94,000 comments on her three blogs. Wow. Wow. Liz, the author of The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog: An Insider’s Guide to How Conversation Is Changing the Way that Business Works, has been named among the The Top Influencers Alive: 10 Breakout Influencers of 2011, and was on Forbes list of Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers in the same week. She writes her popular Successful Blog  as well as what she calls her “writing blog” and the Liz Strauss blog.

If you don’t know Liz, she also was named Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers, Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008 and 2009,  50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media, NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers and her blog is listed on Alltop Social Media and Alltop Twitterati. Liz is a social web strategist and community builder who works with businesses, universities, and individuals to help them understand how text, words, and images work in the culture of the social web. Learn more about Liz here.

As I said in my last post, Liz knows more than a thing or two both about blogging and publishing. And she knows a lot about how to get readers engaged on a blog. We have differing opinions about how comments can or should be used when blogging a book (as noted in my last post), but if anyone knows how to get readers engaged, it’s Liz. Here’s what she had to say when I asked her about getting readers to comment on blog posts.

You have 4,300+ posts on your Successful Blog and 600+ on your writing blog and several hundred on the Liz Strauss blog. Even more impressive to me, you have 94,000 comments on your blogs. How do you get that kind of engagement from your readers?

Blogging experience. Blogging experience. Information is all over the internet, but your experience of the information is not. A great example of that is movie critics. If every movie critic only blogged the information about a movie, we’d only need one movie critic. That’s critical. Don’t try to tie everything up in a bow. A blog is about conversation, not presentation.

What I just did [here at BWE] was presentation, so I’m quite happy with the idea that maybe nobody had any Q&A because it was about me presenting information. But I’ve actually gone back in and undone pieces of blog posts because I’ve tied it up too completely. Don’t tie everything up like you did with your essays. It doesn’t leave me as a reader anything to say but “great blog post.”

In other words, leave people with something to think about?

I call it, “Be complete but not thorough.” Don’t put the finishing touches on the painting, so to speak. It actually makes the post easier to write.

Along that same line, if you go reaching for a list of “how many things,” make a bulleted list without a number in mind. You can put the ordered list down, and let it number itself. Don’t go for seven or ten, just go for however many you think of. Then, after that write, “That’s how many I thought of,” because if you go reaching to fill out to ten, once again, you’re not leaving me any room. Stop and just say, “I thought of five. I bet you can think of more.” First of all, that’s truthful. Second of all, you leave me room to add something.

And that’s when you get the comments?

Right. Conversation is about me having an idea, and then it’s your turn to talk. A blog post, a true blog post, is really about one idea.

The most important parts of a blog post are the title and the question at the end. People write, “So, what do you think?” and that’s the right thing to do. “What do I think about the Vietnam War?” Ask a question that you or they can answer. And actually consider how someone might answer the question.

Sometimes I actually model the answer. I have a series of blog posts that are just questions, called “Questions to Get Closer to You.” Literally, they are just questions, like “What are three words that describe you and your business?” and then to help you out, I’ll answer the first one. I went into the comment box when I published it and wrote my answer, because sometimes people don’t want to comment because they don’t know what to write.

If you’re constantly thinking about your readers and their experience of what you’re doing, you might think, “Oh, I might be afraid to answer this because I wouldn’t know what kind of answer people are looking for. I’m such a weird thinker that I’ll end up being the one who’s way off in left field.”

What are the kinds of questions you ask readers at the end of posts?

Often the question I ask at the end becomes the title of the blog post. There’s one I’m working on right now that I know the question at the end is going to become the title of the blog post, and I haven’t even written it yet. It’s called “Are You Using Your Time Promiscuously?” I know where I’m going, but I haven’t gotten there yet. So, they’re pretty straightforward.

I wrote a blog post about CFD, a syndrome I named called “Can’t Follow Directions,” and it was called, “Has a CFD experience harmed your business?” That’s the question at the end. I explain how I did this thing where I invited people to give me five bits of information, and eighty percent of the two-hundred-some people who sent in the information couldn’t give me all five bits of information. This is the reason why CFD can really hurt your business, and it can hurt your business whether you’re the one who’s not following directions or someone else you’re working with can’t follow directions.

I offer a lot of information on my blogs and don’t get a lot of responses. I guess don’t always ask good questions at the end of my posts.

You have to be thinking about “What would I say back to myself after I read this?”

When I first began blogging, I learned that if I was about to put a sub-head in, I would cut the blog post and move that to Tuesday. What actually happened for a while was the blog post that I thought on Monday was going to be one blog post would end up running all week.  Tuesday I would start writing the post with that sub-head, and I would end up breaking that up again and again.

I find two things: If you’re trying too hard to make a sentence, that’s may be trying to be a good writer or maybe the sentence doesn’t belong there. If the blog post is getting long, you probably have two blog posts there. You want to hit it with a nice, killer bump at the end. We’re all reluctant readers. With lots of sub-heads, you’re going to have lots of type and turn people off.

Many  writers who are blogging books or promoting their books approach their topics as experts. They offer information. I see and read many blogs like this as well. These bloggers don’t tend to get as many reader comments. Can you discuss the different types of blogs and role comments play on these blogs?

What makes a blog a blog is that people are commenting on the posts. Obviously I’m being a purist here. Do you want to talk about the kind of blogs that The New York Times does, and The Harvard Business Review? If so, then you’re talking about a magazine with comments, and that’s not what I’m talking about. On these, basically people are just saying, “Yeah, I really like what you wrote,” or “Good job.”

I have a blog post from probably 2007, “Humility,” where the conversation goes on for about a hundred and three comments, where through that conversation I had ideas change; I found out why I do not like the sentence, “your humble servant.” I always knew I didn’t like it, but I found out why. Somebody had said something like, “You have to accept thing. Humility is about accepting anything,” and in the conversation ideas were actually changing, thoughts were changing. A conversation and discussion was actually happening.

I’ve had it happen more than once that I put a blog post out there and I thought I know what it was about and someone took it in a totally different direction.  It’s like when you’re sitting in a bar with four friends, and you put an idea out there and they take the conversation in an entirely different direction than you ever expected. That’s what the genre is about, and that’s why people call it “the conversation.”

Liz had a few more things to say about comments on blogged books in a previous post based on my BlogWorld interview with her. You can read them here.

With Liz’s last words in mind, let me ask you, my blog readers, a question: What have you done to garner comments on your blogs or blogged books? What has worked best to engage your readers?

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

Liz Strauss on How to Blog a Book, Repurpose Posts & Use Comments

January 17, 2012 By 3 Comments

Every once in a while you get to meet someone who inspires deep respect, who inspires you, who you can use as a model in some area of your life. For me, that person is Liz Strauss.

While I was at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2011 in Los Angeles this past November, I had the chance to hear Liz, the author of The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog: An Insider’s Guide to How Conversation Is Changing the Way that Business Works, speak and then to sit down and chat with her. She and I had an interesting conversation about blogging books and publishing in general. We covered a variety of topics, agreeing on most things even when it sounded like we didn’t.

It’s hard not to be impressed by Liz’s accomplishments. (In fact, I wrote a piece about how to accomplish your potential based on some advice she offered me during that same conversation.) If you don’t know Liz, here’s a not-so-brief bio: She writes Successful Blog  as well as what she calls her “writing blog” and the Liz Strauss blog. She has over 20 years in print, software, and online publishing experience and is a strategist, CEO and founder of SOBCon. She has been named one of The Top Influencers Alive: 10 Breakout Influencers of 2011 and was on Forbes list of Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers in the same week. She also was named Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers, Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008 and 2009, the 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media, and NxE’s Fifty Most Influential “Female” Bloggers. Liz is a social web strategist and community builder who works with businesses, universities, and individuals to help them understand how text, words, and images work in the culture of the social web. For more about her (Yes, there’s a lot more.), click here.

Liz knows a thing or two both about blogging and publishing—actually she knows much more. During my interview with her she offered some useful tips on blogging a book and some thoughtful advice on repurposing posts into a book as well as on the usefulness of comments when blogging a book.  Although some of her views don’t align exactly with mine, such as those about feedback when blogging a book, they are worth taking into consideration.  I thought about them carefully and definitely can understand her perspective, which is why I included them here in this post. I suggest you think about them as well, and keep them in mind as you blog your book or book your blog.

Here’s part one of our conversation which covers Liz’ tips on how to blog a book and how to book a blog (repurpose posts into a book), as well as her thoughts on if book bloggers should use comments as part of their writing process. Check back later this week for part two, which covers how to get more readers to comment on your blog.

With your background in publishing and your experience as a blogger, as well you expertise in helping organizations publish books, what tips would you offer writers and bloggers who are blogging books?

Think of your categories like your table of contents. Most people who write a blog about a cat named Fluffy, for example, name their categories things like “Fluffy’s Food,” “Fluffy’s Toys,” “Fluffy’s Whatever,” and nobody searches on Fluffy’s Food,” they search on “what cats eat.” When naming your categories, think of them as your table of contents, but don’t be clever. Name them in ways people will actually search for them so you’ll get the traffic and build your network before you need it.

Second, think of your tags as your index, and that helps to sort things as well.

Nobody’s really disciplined enough to do either one well enough for it to work.

Do you have any other suggestions for either setting out to write a book online—blogging a book—or repurpose posts into a book—booking a blog?

I actually thought about helping people do that. I would build eight buckets, or categories, that were going to be my eight chapters. I would still outline the book in a more traditional fashion before I ever started blogging it, because that actually makes blogging it a whole lot easier. It gives you your editorial calendar, allows you to come up with ideas and it keeps you focused. It would actually draw a better audience for the blog itself that way. It’s just way too easy when you’re blogging to start in thinking you’re blogging a book, then suddenly to start following your statistics or you’ll meet people who are writing about other things; then the next thing you know, you’ll end up writing about social media—even though your book was about dogs. You won’t even realize that you’ve gotten totally off topic from your book.

On this blog, I actually suggest to aspiring authors that they go through what I call “the proposal process.” I have them start with the format of a book proposal and evaluate the whole book idea doing basically what you suggest and more. They mind map the book’s content, come up with a table of contents, and create a document offline. Then they publish bits and pieces of it in posts—they bog a book.

That’s awesome. I’m the opposite, you know—4,300 blog posts. I’ve got, like, 63 books on my blog, and I don’t want to write any of them because I’ve already solved the problems by writing the blog posts. So, I really don’t care; you want to write a book out of them, go ahead.

Taking published posts and trying to figure out which posts to use for a book after the fact can be difficult as well, don’t you think?

Yes, the posts weren’t written to be connected to each other, which means they have to be rewritten in order to write a really good book. A really good blog posts stands alone.  You can’t take 32 blog posts and put them together and have continuity. That’s like a myth. If you put the simplest blog posts written even in a series together, they still end.  The one that comes next still has a beginning. So you still have to make that transition happen. Otherwise it still like reading a bunch of blog posts.

Or else you have to design the book to be like a set of memos, a set of blog posts. Jason Fried did a really good job of that in his book Rework. If you know he has a blog, you can recognize that what he’s done. But he writes such brilliant and beautifully done blog posts, that if you don’t know he has a blog you just figure he wrote very short chapters—as in one-page chapters.

Most bloggers who repurpose their posts into a book actually combine them to create longer chapters.

Right, and actually, as a person who’s done a lot of content writing can do that.

One of the first projects I ever worked on was for reluctant readers. We only had sixteen lines of type to write critical science information about topics with words like photosynthesis in them. One of the things I found out really early in my editorial career was that it is far easier to write twelve lines of text than it is to take sixteen lines of text and edit it to twelve lines of text. It is far easier to take twelve lines of text and edit it to sixteen lines of text, and you get way better copy if you know what you’re writing to start with.

I did it; I actually wrote a series of blog posts on six-plus traits of writing, and then I turned that into an e-book. I know the experience of it, and it’s like, “Yeah, I already wrote that, and I want to keep this copy, and…” You write the transition, and the transition is written at different times than the blog post, and you don’t really read the blog post the same way you would’ve read the blog post when you were writing it. So the voice sort of shifts, you know? You either need an excellent editor, or you really ought to just start over?

I think the way Dan Pink writes a book from a blog is the way to do it, where he actually writes a whole draft of a chapter on his blog and gets feedback, as opposed to writing blog posts. I think it’s a far stronger way.  A book is about a one-way conversation, and a blog post is about a two-way conversation.

You are known for getting a huge number of comments on your blogs. For those aspiring authors blogging a book, it seems to me that comments from readers would provide great feedback on their content. What do you think?

I don’t think you want to get feedback if you’re writing a book, because it’s inappropriate to be getting doing so while you’re still writing. That’s sort of like building a strategy with a team; the best way to build a strategy is to go off and build the strategy and then put it in front of the team and say, “Here’s the strategy. What do you think of it?” If you try to build a strategy with a team, you end up with a camel. You can’t build a budget with a team. You can build a piece of the budget on your own and put all the pieces together.

When you write a book, though, you usually want feedback; you want to show your manuscript to readers or a critique group. The readers of a blog are the same people who will actually read the book. Wouldn’t their comments provide good feedback?

You want feedback on completed things, though. If you get feedback on every piece, that’s like, saying, “I’ve mixed the eggs and the butter, what do you think?” “Okay, now I’ve added the salt, what do you think?” “Okay, now I’ve added the flour, what do you think?”

I understand what you’re saying, but you might get some suggestion that make you decide to add or change something, because you still are creating the first draft of your manuscript. Don’t you think that would be valuable to the process?

I think that’s the same as asking a crowd-sourcing design, and I you’re more likely to get ninety percent of things that are going to waste your time. I would purposely keep it into the realm where people are commenting on what you’re doing, and where you’re saying ‘thank you’, that’s a great idea, and not have a conversation about it. You should own your book, and it should be your work, not crowd-sourced.

If you’re writing a book, you can’t give up the expert role while you’re mixing the butter and the eggs. In the blogger’s role, you can actually learn with your community. You can say, “I’m going to find this out: Does anybody want to go exploring with me? it’s more like the researcher kind of thing, you know?

You can’t be a driver and a passenger at the same time. Writing a book is about being the driver. You can then ask somebody how well you drove, even stop off in the middle at a rest area, and say, “How well am I driving?” But if you’re at the point where they’re telling you to turn your turn signals on, then you’re probably still a student driver and you probably shouldn’t be giving advice.

I was thrilled to get Liz’s input on how to blog a book and use comments in conjunction with doing so. I suggest you read her Successful Blog , and let me know what’s been working best for you when it comes to planning, writing and getting or utilizing comments on your blogged book. I’d love to know.

Check back in a few days for part two of my interview with Liz when she tells us how to get more readers to comment on our blogs.

Filed Under: Booking a Blog (Repurposing Content into a Book), Building a Better Blog, Writing Posts/Chapters

Darren Rowse on Book Deals and Discovery in the Blogosphere

January 12, 2012 By 4 Comments

Like most recipients of blog-to-book deals, Darren Rowse landed his while simply blogging. However, he already had started thinking about writing a book—or, more specifically, turning his blog, ProBlogger, into a book. Then, he and his blog were discovered. That’s what many of us want—that email or phone call from an agent or publisher saying, “Have you thought of writing a book or turning your blog into a book?”

While I was at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles this past November, I sat down with Darren Rowse, the author of the extremely popular ProBlogger blog and the co-author of ProBlogger the book, which was published in 2010 by Wiley. Darren also writes other blogs Digital Photography School, FeelGooder and TwiTip) and makes his living as a professional blogger.

In this, part two of my interview with Darren, he talks about his book deal, writing his book, how to create a better blog, and getting noticed in the blogosphere. (To read part one, click here.)

How did your blog-to-book deal come about?

ProBlogger, the book, was always something I thought I possibly could do.  By the time [Chris Garrett and I] wrote the book there must have been 4,000 or so posts on ProBlogger. Readers would say, “I can’t find things on your blog. Have you written about so and so?” The problem with a blog is that it’s usually the last post that’s on the front page, and readers don’t have an easy way to find things unless you think carefully about your navigation and how to drive people into your archives.  A lot of the archives sit their unread. I’d already started to write something that was kind of a how-to-blog book for beginners because I was getting a lot of questions about that topic. I was trying to put it together more as an ebook at the time. I didn’t really know how to publish it.

Then Wiley came to me and said, “Have you ever thought of writing a book?”

I thought, “I’ve already started.” So, I sent the guy a copy of what I’d written.

He said, “This is a good basis for a book.” I did need to rewrite it, and I worked with Chris Garrett as a co-author on it and really about taking those bones and adding examples and making it flow a bit more.

How much of ProBlogger, the book, is based on actual blog posts or what was already on the blog?

That original manuscript I was writing was straight from the blog, but most of it was rewritten and updated as a combination of posts brought together. I was writing about how to monetize a blog and had written 300-400 articles on that. I was trying to work out which were the best posts and which were relevant and meshing them together. It was more of a rewrite than a copy and paste, that’s for sure. I took ideas from comments as well; that was probably one of the best parts about it. I’d written things, and then readers had added comments and their different experiences. I was able to take those ideas and incorporate them. Some turned into examples and screen shots used in the book.

The concept of blogging a book revolves around the fact that writing one in short bits—blog posts—makes it less overwhelming.  How did you write your book?

That’s how I ended up doing it. Breaking it down into short sections or tasks.

Although, having said that, I locked myself in a hotel for five days at the end as the deadline loomed and knocked it out. There were times I broke it down and others when I had to vomit out a lot at once. It’s more about your personality and how you work best.

I think working with someone else was good, too. Co-authoring with Chris worked well. His skill set is quite different than mine, and the way he works is quiet different from the way I work. So it was useful to be able to tag team.

What’s the most important thing a blogger can do to get noticed in the blogosphere?

One of the biggest things is just to be useful and create content that’s worth being noticed. You can get noticed by being controversial, being stupid, or attacking someone, or all those things, but unless you’ve got something useful to contribute—something that is actually productive, I think getting noticed is a waste of time. It can be counterproductive to do those other things. So, as a foundational thing, be useful.

Then, try to work at how to serve other bloggers and develop other win-win relationships with them. A lot of the bloggers I’ve worked with, those relationships have started with me offering my services to them or them offering their services to me in some way and us serving each other. This then ends in all sorts of wonderful collaborations and them linking up to me or me linking up to them. A lot of bloggers see each other as competition, but I think we should be trying to grow each others blogs mutually. That’s probably been the best thing for me.

What advice would you give to bloggers and writers or aspiring authors wanting to produce ebooks?

I always wanted to create my own products to sell. Writing a [traditionally published] book is great, but obviously you are earning a very small percentage of the sale price, which is fine. There are other benefits to writing and publishing a book.  I always wanted to do it but felt it was overwhelming. As someone who writes posts, which could be 100 words or maybe 1,000 words, to write something so big felt overwhelming.

My first ebooks where purely taking blogs posts I’d written, putting them into a collection, adding a few more bits to each of them, and then selling them almost as short cuts to the topic. I was very skeptical as to whether this would work; I didn’t think my readers would want repurposed content, but in the end they actually demanded it. My first ebook was purely a collection of posts that I added a little bit to, and readers had been asking for me to do that. So, my first piece of advice is: The things you’ve already written could be the basis for your ebook.

We’ve done about 14 ebooks now, and the ones that have done the best have been a combination of teaching and homework, or tasks to do, rather than purely information. They’ve driven people to action. So 31 Days to Build a Better Blog gives you something to read every day and something to do every day. It’s more of a workbook. We’ve tried to incorporate things to go away and do even in our photography books, and the feedback from that has been really good. In fact, people often take our ebooks now and run a course on them on their own blogs, which we are quite happy for them to do because they point people back to the ebook; they all work through the ebook together. 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a great example. Heaps of groups have gone through that together. They’re using our ebook, and that’s driven a lot of the sales.

In terms of topics for your ebook, you want to think really carefully about the outcome of ebook. On Digital Photography School, we released two ebooks by the same author, both very similar in terms of the voice, both beautifully designed, really great information. One was about travel photography, so it had a really specific outcome; when you read this it will improve your travel photos. The other one was about color, which is a really important topic, but there is no tangible outcome. People weren’t going to read it and take travel photos. They just weren’t worrying about color. We found it harder to market that second book because it didn’t have a tangible outcome. I think choosing topics and thinking about how you are going to market them even before you start writing the ebook is really important. That’s something we learned. Now we bring our marketing people in to talk to the author in before we start. We want the author to write with some tangible outcomes in mind. That’s helped a lot.

What advice would you give to writers wanting to blog a book—or blog—and build readership/platform while doing so?

Certainly, when I talked to Wiley, they sparked up even more when I told them we had a readership and we had a community and were on Twitter and all of that.

I get a lot of emails from authors saying, “My book is coming out next week, how do start a blog to support it?” It’s just way too late at that point. At the very least you should be sharing some of the topics you are writing about, getting feedback and getting engagement around those topics as you are writing, if not posting some of your content as you are writing it. That not only improves your writing, but you are building a readership for your book as you do so, building anticipation for the book.

What one or two things that you did would you attribute to your blogging success and to the book deal you landed?

I think a lot of it comes down to longevity. Most bloggers give up after or by three months. Blogging for a year, two years, three years, nine years—I think I’m up to now, that builds your brand, builds your credibility, shows your readers you’re not just here one day and gone the next, which builds trust with readers. While at BlogWorld Expo I’ve met people who have been reading my blog since 2003. Even though I don’t know them, they feel like they know me. I think that is a big part of it—that personal connection people feel over time. So, longevity and being useful.

Every post I write I ask myself, “Does this matter?  Is this a post that is actually going to matter to someone, or is it about my ego? Is it actually going to serve someone?” If it isn’t going to serve someone, there really isn’t much point in publishing it.

If you’ve been blogging your book as discussed on this blog, you don’t need to weed through thousands of posts to book your blog. If you have simply been blogging, however, like Darren, you can begin repurposing your posts for a traditionally published book or a variety of ebooks—and you can continue to build your blog readership so you get discovered by a traditional publisher or become attractive to one when you shop your book idea to agents and publishers. Remember, generating traffic to your blog ensures book sales for any book—traditionally published or self-published.

Let me know how you’re blogging and book blogging efforts are going. Feel free to leave your questions and comments here for Darren or for me.

Look me up at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City (January 20-22). I’ll be teaching a session on “How to Blog a Book.” As a new attendee, you can save $115 on full registration with this code: WDCSPEAKER12. Go to http://bit.ly/WDC2012 to register.

Filed Under: Blogging Short Books, Blogs Turned Into Books, Booking a Blog (Repurposing Content into a Book), Building a Better Blog, Landing an Angent or Traditional Publisher Tagged With: , , ,

Darren Rowse: On Creating Profitable and Successful Blogs

January 10, 2012 By 7 Comments

Not only do I want my book blogging to result in a traditional publishing deal or a successfully self-published book, I also want that effort to create a successful blog that continues to attract readers and income after the book is published. This should be your goal as well. That’s how you create a business and a career  around your book and your blog.

To find out how to accomplish this feat, I asked Darren Rowse for an interview while I was at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles this past November. Darren is the author of the extremely popular ProBlogger blog and the co-author of ProBlogger, the book, which was published in 2010 by Wiley. (If you recall, my last two posts consisted of interviews with his co-author, Chris Garrett.)

I was excited to interview Darren, a warm and humble man not above sitting on the floor in the hallway of the convention center for our interview, for several reasons. First, I wanted to find out about his blog-to-book deal and experience and to write a post about it. Also, since he blogs about both how to become a successfully blogger and one who makes money at this endeavor, I wanted to pick his brain for great information on this topic to share with you here. Why? Because if you can create a great blog as you blog your book, your odds of getting noticed by readers, agents or publishers increases tremendously. Plus, by making money as you blog or blog your book you can create a job, as well as a career, as an author in the process. (Remember that a blogger is an author and a publisher, and to have a career as either you do need to earn an income.)

Darren began blogging and, like many bloggers, learned by experience. He’s shared those lessons generously—as he did in this interview—for almost ten years on ProBlogger. He also has a photography blog, called Digital Photography School, and writes FeelGooder and TwiTip as well. He makes his living as a professional blogger.

My interview with Darren was quite long. I’ve broken it into two parts. Part one covers a variety of topics, including researching your blog, increasing traffic (readership) to your blog, creating a profitable blog, and producing a successful blog. Part two, which I’ll publish later this week, will deal with Darren’s blog-to-book deal, writing a book, and blogging a book.

What, if any, market research did you do before beginning your blog?

In 2002, when I started blogging, I didn’t really do any research at all. That blog was purely an extension of me. I was writing about everything and anything, but as I blogged I realized my readers wanted less. They wanted a more focused blog because I was blogging about photography, blogging, church, movies, and all kinds of stuff I was involved with. The more topics I wrote about, the less people I found who had all of those interests. Like most people, I’m a fairly eclectic person.

That’s when I started to focus on niches. The first one was a photography blog, which wasn’t really researched. ProBlogger isn’t a blog that was overly researched, but it was probably more intuitively researched. I realized a lot of bloggers were starting to talk about blogs and debate the idea, and I was beginning to debate the idea myself. It was more a blog I wanted to read and that I thought my friends wanted to read.

Do you recommend people do research before they start a blog?

It’s probably more important to start with a topic you are interested in and engaged with. It is probably worth testing that topic with other people; that’s worth a little bit of research. Obviously, if you want to make a bit of money, then you want people to read it. If there is no one is interested in that topic, then it is probably not a good topic. The global usage of the Internet is so big now, though, that there is always going to be someone interested. Even quite tiny niches can grow reasonable good sized audiences.

How long did it take for you to gain blog readers, and can you pin point any certain event that created a tipping point when readership noticeably increased?

I don’t remember a lot of the readership stats from the early days, but it probably took about a year or so on that personal blog before it began to get reasonable well read and quite well known in some of its areas. ProBlogger took about a year and a half to grow to a point where I would say it was a full-time income and enough to live on.

On that blog the tipping point in terms of traffic was probably when I actually revealed that I was making money from blogging and talked a little bit about the reality of it and that it was a full time thing. I kind of avoided talking about that; I didn’t want it to be a sensational post, like “Darren Makes This Much Money!” But I had to talk about the personal aspect of it almost in that way to give some credibility to topic.

Most of my other blogs have had fairly steady growth; there’s not been a whole heap of “this moment changed everything.” There’s been a series of posts I’ve written that have grown the audience and shown a spike in traffic, but then things died down. Over time things trended upward.

I know a professional blogger who says you have to write a certain number of posts before you see a big traffic change—actually 1,000 posts. Would you agree?

I’ve often said the fist thousand posts are the hardest. I’ve talked to bloggers who in their first week have had massive traffic because they’ve written something that hit the mark with people. And then for others it takes years. You certainly grow as a writer and learn the skills of blogging the more you do it and practice it. Like any type of writing, you improve as you write. I’d be hesitant to put a number on the number of post you need.

What are the 3-5 top things you do to drive traffic (readers) to your blog?

  1. Writing the content that will serve them is the thing to do first. It doesn’t bring the readers in, but it certain helps when they are there to keeps them. I think that is really important. If I were starting again and trying to drive readers I would go through an exercise or try to work out who I want to read the blog and define their needs and where they were hanging out.
  2. Working out where the readers are on line. With Digital Photograph School, they were all on Flickr at the time. On Flickr photo sharing site people have cameras. So that’s a place where I developed a Flickr group, which is like a Facebook page, and I began to develop relationships there and share the links to what we were writing to build engagement on another site. As a result of that, we were able to drive people back to our site. That was probably a fairly significant thing.
  3. Developing relationships with other bloggers who had my potential reader.  LifeHacker is a big tech how to site and they let you submit story ideas.  I was constantly submitting story ideas, and probably one in four they would pick up. After a while you get the feel for the type of things they are interested in. They drove a lot of traffic in to Digital Photography School. Even though they weren’t a photography site, they had technologically inclined how-to articles that related to ours. I developed that relationship, got to know the editor of that site. They started watching us, and I didn’t have to submit so much. Ten others might pick up the thread on your post on that site as well, and you get on the front page of Delicious or Digg because of the accumulation of traffic.
  4. Social media can be good if you pick the right one for your audience. These days a lot of our readers hang out on Facebook; they don’t use Twitter so much in the photography space. Developing a space there proved good.
  5. Set up an email newsletter list. This didn’t help us find new readers, but it helps us drive traffic every week. We send out a newsletter each week, which is basically just a recap of our posts for the week. That drives our biggest day of traffic by far; it doubles or triples our normal day of traffic because we send out an email to all the people who have subscribed over the years. We have a nicely designed template and list the posts and feature a few photos in it. We have a few ads in it either for our own ebooks, or we sell the ads. If we don’t send that out, our readers say, “Where’s my newsletter?” They love it. They come to expect it. It’s a useful way of keeping in touch with the site. That’s why we promote our newsletter so heavily on the site. Also, it makes it easy for them to know what posts ran that week. Most of our readers have no idea what an RSS feed is or what Twitter is. Some don’t understand what Facebook is. So they’ve got no other way of getting notification of new posts other than email, and so they thank us. It’s certainly not seen as a spammy type thing by our readers. I don’t do that so much on ProBlogger, but on the photo site it’s gold.

How did you become profitable with your blog?

In the early days, I did so was mainly with ads, or ad networks, like Google’s ad network, and a little affiliate marketing, like recommending books on Amazon—so mainly books. As I started the photography site, I recommended cameras and earned a small commission on those—four percent. But if you’re selling $1,000 cameras, it can add up.

Would you say that’s pretty doable for most bloggers?

It comes down to having a readership. If you don’t have anyone reading your blog, you won’t have anyone clicking those ads. But that certainly is very easy to implement the ads. You just copy and paste some code.

What kind of readership do you need to start implementing ads and seeing income?

It varies a little from niche to niche because some of the ads will pay more in some niches than in others. I was always aiming for 1,000 readers a day; in my mind that was what I needed to start making enough for it to be a part time job. Then again I now know other bloggers with a couple hundred readers a day who sell ebooks or their own products or services, and they are well on their well to being full-time bloggers because of the price of their products and the engagement they have with those readers. If you’ve got really loyal readers and they are going to buy the things you recommend or that you make, you can build an income stream quite quickly.

Can you offer my readers 3-4 tips for producing a successful blog?

It’s a combination of things.

  1. Heart.
  2. Telling stories. That is gold. It certainly has worked for me—being personal on the blog. Telling my own story, and giving reader a space to tell theirs, either in posts or in comments.
  3. Building interaction and community on your blog. A lot of bloggers just provide information and don’t actually provide interaction. For us, that meant setting up a forum area. For others, that would mean setting up a Facebook page where you can have that engagement. For others, it’s purely in the comment section. Asking lots of questions. I think building community is very important.
  4. Then you have to be strategic. How am I going to find subscribers for my blog? Doing analysis on the different technologies.  Maybe its RSS feeders, maybe its email, maybe it’s Facebook. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe you need to send them letters? Some people don’t hang out on the Web much at all, but you can drive them there in some other way. Working out those kinds of strategies: How will I find those readers, how do I hook them into the site, and then what journey will I take them on? After they’ve subscribed, then what next? Do you want them to follow you on Twitter? Do you want them to comment on a post? You might send an email that says, “Here are 10 of our most popular posts. Drop by and let us know what you think of them. Leave a comment.” It’s thinking strategically and asking yourself, “What journey do I want to take my readers on?”

Look for part two of my interview with Darren later this week. Until then, his tips and advice should keep you busy building a better blog and blogging a better book. Feel free to leave your questions and comments here for Darren or for me.

About Darren Rowse

DarrenRowse has been blogging since 2002 and doing it professionally — earning a full-time living from the medium — since 2004/5. You can find his blogs at ProBlogger, Digital Photography School, FeelGooder, and TwiTip and find out more about how he became a full time blogger here.

Before he became a blogger he worked in quite a few jobs but had primarily been working in churches as a minister (mainly with youth and young adults) for around 10 years. He has a degree in Theology and half a degree in marketing. He is also an entrepreneur who loves dreaming up ideas, starting new things and letting his “creative juices loose on projects that I often start up on an impulse.”

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Professional Blogging, Selling Books and Information Products Tagged With: , , ,

Chris Garrett on How to Turn Blog Readers Into Book Buyers

January 3, 2012 By 3 Comments

As part of this blog’s new focus, this is the first of a series of posts I’m going to publish during January based upon interviews I conducted at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles, CA, in early November 2011. While there I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Garrett, Darren Rowse, Liz Strauss, Mari Smith, C.C. Chapman, and a few other successful bloggers, social networkers, and content creators. I hope you will read the posts based upon these interviews, and then start the New Year by applying all the great information provided by these experts. They talked with me about how to produce a better blog, drive traffic to your site, get your readers engaged, sell books and products, and many important things that help  blogged books get discovered by a publisher or, at a minimum, build the readership you need to eventually turn out a successful self-published book. At the very least, if you apply the tips and lessons they offer, you’ll produce a better blog to help you promote your book.

Given that we are discussing blogged books, your ability to create a successful book—one that sells many copies—depends in part upon converting blog readers into buyers. If you also want to make a living—or at least some income—as a blogger and as an author, you need to accomplish this feat. A variety of factors contribute to how many readers you attract to your blogged book and later to the printed book or ebook you self-publish or a publisher produces for you. These same factors determine how easily you sell any ancillary services or products you might choose to offer to loyal readers, such as webinars and teleseminars, coaching or home-study courses, all of which help produce income for bloggers and authors.

So, how do you convert blogged book readers (or simply blog readers) into ebook or printed book buyers? More important, how do you get readers to your blog in the first place and then get them to stay around long enough to later buy your ebook, printed book, other products and services?

I had the opportunity while at BlogWorld to get answers to these questions from Chris Garrett, co-author of ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, and an online business consultant, teacher, coach, new media industry commentator, writer, speaker, and all-round web geek. Chris has been involved in several startups and has written for some of the web’s best-loved blogs. He also has co-authored four other traditionally published print books and many ebooks. (See the end of this post for a full bio.) Below, find my questions, and Chris’ answers, in part one of this two-part blog post:

What are the most important things bloggers should do to build loyal readers that translate into book buyers as well as purchasers of ancillary products and services, such as webinars and teleseminars?

There are four main things a blogger has to concentrate on: attraction, retention, conversion, and, referrals, or sharing.

The big mistake bloggers make is they only concentrate on one—traffic, or gaining attention. Instead, bloggers should focus on attraction and then retention.

A lot of bloggers think they have to drive traffic, which is a mistake in itself, and forget about the people they have already attracted. Get people to subscribe (especially by your email because hardly anybody outside of technical geeks understand RSS), and nurture that audience so you get them to stick around.

And then you can take action, which is the conversion. Taking action could be a blog reader making a comment, signing up for your email list, signing up for your webinar, buying your book. But you can’t just get someone to give you their attention and then buy straight away or take an action straight away because they don’t know who you are; they aren’t sure they like you or trust you yet. That retention piece is really, really important.

If you do retention well, then the fourth part is getting referrals, getting people to talk about you, getting people to share, and that’s how all of this becomes less of an uphill struggle. You have that compounding affect because you are attracting what in the corporate word we would call advocates. They are basically your fans, people who are going to talk about you.

Is there one mistake you see often that those building a blog readership and wanting to sell something—like a book—should avoid?

A lot of bloggers try to sell something straight away without building up any good will, or they burn out their audience by constantly asking for things. You see this in social media as well. People say, “This social media doesn’t work. No one is clicking on my links,” but you see that all they are pushing out there are links. This is like going up to someone on the street and asking for ten dollars rather than asking a friend you’ve known for years for a loan.

You have to have that good will, and that comes from building relationships. That means you have to retain people’s attention, and that means you have to keep giving people good stuff and telling them what to expect in terms of their future.

So from the point of your audience, it comes down to “What’s in it for me, why should I care, what am I going to get out of this,” and you’ve got to nurture that.

For a writer or aspiring author blogging—someone who may not be a “blogger” per say—what are the things they need to do to attract, retain, convert, and then gain referrals so they might attract a publisher or buyers to a self-published book?

If you are a writer or an aspiring author, you’ve got lots of content to share. Start telling people about what you have to offer. Don’t tell people about your website. Telling people about what they are going to get, what they are going to achieve, by listening to you or the results they’ll get by taking your advice is always better than saying, “I have this awesome website or book I want to tell you about.” Instead say, “Here’s a tip that will help you achieve your goals or solve your problem.” Even if [your book] is entertainment, the focus is on what’s in it for them. That’s what you start with.

You might begin with a tiny audience of people who know you—your network. If you do a good job of articulating the benefit and the outcome of what they are going to get, word will spread. And you can encourage that by sharing more content relevant to their interests and to what they need.

If there are people in your network who can help you spread the message, that’s always better than you saying, “I’m awesome.”  If someone else says, “You need to check Chris out because he’s awesome, and this is where you go to check him out,” it always sounds better than blowing your own horn.

In Mari Smith’s session [at BlogWorld], she talked about Social Media Examiner going from zero subscribers to 150,000 in a really short time. Mike Stelzner went to Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman and myself and said, “[Social Media Examiner] is going to be great, and will you help me get it off the ground? Will you use your influence to get people to check it out?” We knew it was worth people checking out because he had put a lot of value into the site. It wasn’t like telling people, “Please follow me on Twitter.”  This was going to help them achieve what they wanted to do. So we helped.

Again, the main thing to remember is to focus on your audience and on what they want and need rather than on what you want.

Check in on Thursday for Part 2 of this interview with Chris Garrett. In the meantime, if you have had success turning blog readers into book buyers, please share your experiences by leaving a comment.

More About Chris Garrett

Although Chris Garrett has been “online” since the 1980?s, it was in 1994 Chris first became addicted to the World Wide Web. Since then he has helped thousands of individuals, non-profits, small businesses and blue chips such as Heinz, Toshiba, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Durex, amongst others, make the most of the internet.

In 2005 Chris left the advertising agency world and founded a company to help smaller businesses and solo-entrepreneurs profit from their skills, knowledge and experience, achieve more with Online Media, and grow audiences of people who know, like and trust them. See how your business could benefit from working with Chris on the services page here.

As well as coaching and training companies and individuals, Chris also regularly speaks at conferences around the world about internet salesmanship, writing compelling content, and social media for business. He has spoken at events such as BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the Successful Outstanding Bloggers conference in Chicago, Think Visibility, Affiliate Expo, Wishlist Member Live, WordCamp, the Netherlands Social Media Congres and the Institute of Fundraising, along with the dozens of webinars, teleseminars and virtual events he holds or contributes to annually.

Chris was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1974. He lived in the UK for most of his life but now lives back in Calgary with his wife, daughter, cat, and a three-year-old Cocker Spaniel.

www.chrisg.com

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Increasing Traffic, Publicizing Your Blog, Selling Books and Information Products Tagged With: , , , ,

New Year, New Look, New Goals

December 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

I’m proud to unveil How to Blog a Book’s new design! I hope you like it. It’s cleaner, brighter and aligns with the design of the new How to Blog a Book printed book (which is now available for presale). Plus, it takes the blog to a new level.

I have written about starting out with free or hosted blogs, and then moving up to self-hosted blogs, ones where you pay a hosting company and purchase a domain name of your own. There also comes a time when you want to move away from free themes and have a custom-designed header and other unique features on your blog. With my book coming out in late April or early May, for me that time was now.

Additionally, a new year offers an opportunity to consider new goals. For several months now I’ve been thinking about how to improve this blog. After all, I’ve finished blogging the book. What more can I offer you, my blog readers? I can offer you what I myself want: tips and tools for creating a better blog. Why? Because the best way to blog a book and get noticed is to create a great blog that attracts lots of readers. That, of course, means creating great blog content. When you do that, everything falls into place. You can land a book deal or self-publish a successful book, and you can monetize your blog in a variety of ways–including with all types of information products, including printed and digital books, coaching products, teleseminars, etc.

To achieve this goal, I’ll be introducing a variety new features to the blog, including expert interviews, guest blog posts, and podcasts. While I will continue to offer tons of information on how to blog a book, I’ll also discuss how to book  a blog (repurpose blog posts into information products) and create the best blog and blog posts possible. I’ll also provide information on publishing as it pertains to blogging a book and landing a traditional book deal or self-publishing your book.

Oh…and I’d love to hear more from you this year as well. You can start by letting me know what you think of the new design and giving me ideas for topics you’d like to discuss over the next 12 months. Leave me a comment here!

Happy New Year!

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, What to Do When You Complete Your Blogged Book Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Maintain Passion, Purpose and Inspiration while Blogging a Book

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I advocate for planning out your blogged book’s content and creating a manuscript while you blog by sticking to that content plan. However, blogging should be an organic and creative process even if you are blogging a book. So allow yourself some freedom with your blogged book.

No one is telling you how to write this book or even what to write each day. No one knows if you are sticking to your chapter summaries or table of contents (List of Chapters). There is no right or wrong way to blog your book or to write it. Simply express yourself in an honest and authentic manner. Let your passion, your voice and your authenticity shine through. Let your readers get to know the real you. You’ll be surprised what happens when you do.

In fact, that’s the difference between a successful blog and an unsuccessful one. Successful blogs have at their helms bloggers who write with passion and purpose, who feel inspired and who every day show up as nothing less than their true selves with all their colors flying. Almost every blogger I interviewed for my forthcoming book who landed a book deal attributed his or her success to feeling passionate about the subject of the blog and being authentic while blogging.

You’ll be blogging long past the time you finish writing your book. If you ever find your passion, motivation, enthusiasm, or inspiration for blogging or for blogging your book waning, try these thing:

  • Read other blogs on your topic—and comment on them.
  • Get involved in groups and forums on your subject.
  • Read books on your topic.
  • Set up Google Alerts on your topic or on additional keywords related to your topic (and be sure to open the alerts and read the pertinent posts).
  • Ask some experts to write guest blog posts for you so you get a break.
  • Take a brief blogging vacation (tell your readers you are, in fact, on vacation for two or three days).
  • Do research on your topic.
  • Talk to other people who are interested in your topic or who are experts in your subject area.
  • Explore the possibility of using multimedia on your blog—audio and video.
  • Interview experts in your subject area and post the information or the interview; you can even post it as an audio clip, podcast, or video.
  • Videotape yourself talking about your subject matter or about the process of blogging a book, and post this as a way to let your readers get to know you.

In this way you should be able to maintain that passion and write in an authentic and inspired manner. This should help you create a successful blog and blogged book.

(This post is adapted from a chapter of the printed book, How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time, which is now available for presale on Amazon.com! It’s filled with more than double the amount of great information currently on this blog.)

Filed Under: Building a Better Blog, Writing Posts/Chapters Tagged With: , , ,