A blog provides a useful tool for authors, especially nonfiction authors. Not only does it help you become discoverable to potential readers (which means buyers), it also supports your efforts to become an expert in your subject area.
If you are a coach, professional speaker, healer, or entrepreneur—or you own any type of business—you can blog your way to expert status as well. This will help you boost or build your business.
Yes, you read that correctly. Blogging can make you an expert. You can use your blog to get known as an authority or thought leader in a subject area even if you aren’t one now.
How My Blog Made Me an Expert
Take me as an example. When I began blogging my book, How to Blog a Book, I was not an expert on the topic. In fact, I had never blogged a book before. I had expertise in book publishing and book editing. I had an idea about how to consciously plan out a book, write it, publish it, and promote it online. I was the first one to try the process—and I wrote about it as I did so. Writing three or four blog posts per week on the topic of blogging a book made me an expert. And I accomplished that feat in only four to five months.
In that amount of time my blog achieved number one Google search engine results page (SERP) status. You could find it (and me) on the first page of Google—in the #1 spot—when you searched for anything related to blogging a book, blog-to-book deals, book blogging, or how to blog a book. That provided me with perceived expert status on the topic. Of course, the process of blogging the book also gave me actual expertise in the particular subject area (and I’ve continued to gain experience over the five years since I began blogging a book). I’ve remained the premier expert on blogging books since then (and retained my #1 Google ranking). But I was not an expert when I began my blog.
Novelists can Blog Their Way to Expert Status
If you write fiction you still can use your blog to become an expert. Find the most prevalent themes and subjects in your novels—ones that run through almost all your books. Then blog about these topics. Consider writing a short work of nonfiction on one or more of these topics as well. Before you know it, your blog will rise in the SERPs for these subject areas, and people will see you as an authority.
When potential readers, clients, customers, journalists, and organizations seeking speakers conduct a search on a particular topic and find you and your blog on the first page of Google—and in the first one or two SERP positions, you are perceived as an expert. Period. You hardly need to do anything else.
Publish a book on the same topic as your blog, and you seal the deal. You become a leading authority.
How to Establish Expert Status with Your Blog
No matter the genre in which you choose to write, if you want to be known as an expert, or if you have the goal of building a business around your book(s) or your blog, use your blog to develop expert status.Figure out the primary theme or topic in your books—the subject you know the most about and feel passion about as well. Be sure this lines up with the business you want to create. Then blog in a focused and consistent manner on this topic.
If you already are known as an expert, enhance that status with your blog. Again, blog regularly about your area of expertise. A blog provides the perfect vehicle for creating authority in your subject area or industry, and this helps you get noticed as well as sell books and products effectively.
To accomplish expert status as a blogger, try the 11 strategies I mention in this post. Let me know when you make it to the first page of the SERPs!
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