Here is why:

a. When you, being a published author, write a blog, you don’t just share your thoughts with your readers, you advertise and sell your book(s)—though it may be indirect. A study suggests that companies (in your case individuals), which write blogs regularly on their websites have 67% more chance of their product being bought, or their services availed than those who don’t.

b. Maintaining a blog on your website keeps your web content fresh.

c. It drives traffic to your website which means more people are talking about you—and thus naturally about your books.

d. Having a blog connects you with readers and other writers. The content you generate—and your readers’ feedback may supply you with materials for your next book.

e. Last but not least, if everything goes well, it can generate revenue for you, too.

In this write-up, we’ll briefly guide you on how to write not only a creative blog but how to optimize and maintain it—we’ll discuss what optimization and maintenance mean in the succeeding paragraphs.

So, how should you proceed and start your own blog?

Here is how.

1. What Should You Write About …

If you’ve already authored a book, you can always talk about that—the book, the issues, stories, or causes discussed there. Educating your readers, giving them writing tips, writing book reviews, posting appealing excerpts from your published—or upcoming—book, or sharing your journey of writing with them are some of the things you could look to write on your blog. You can find a great example of such a blog article on our website. Click here to read it.

 A blog could also be something else you are not only passionate about but have the requisite know-how of, too. For instance, you wrote a book on romance, mystery, science-fiction, coming-of-age, children or historical fiction—but you are a travel enthusiast. Write about it. Or if you are fashion aficionado, why not write on it? Similarly, it could be on mental health, travel, lifestyle, storytelling or anything else that thrills you.

At the same time, we’d advise you to talk about things your readers would like to read. Having said this, you must be careful to not hop from one subject to another. By this, we mean that when a reader comes to your blog and goes through your articles, it should give a coherent view to readers of what to expect from you and whether they are in the right place? It’d be fine if the website of a children’s author has articles on parenting, children’s literature, review of children’s books in one section and in the other section—something you are really good at such as travel, fashion or mental health. But if there are too many subjects, the reader would not find the place appealing. This brings us to the second point: Your audience. 

2. Know Your Audience

Being an author, you’ll be well aware of what this means. What do your ideal readers look like? Would your blog interest them? Would it solve their problem? What age group(s) are you targeting? Do they find your writing controversial—and which parts? Do they find it agreeable? These are some of the things you need to be aware of when embarking on your blogging journey. It takes time and patience to build a reliable readership with an engaged reading audience.

3. Make it Simple and Easy-to-read

 In order to gain a larger audience, your blog should be simple and easy to comprehend. Even if this is about a technical subject, avoid as much as possible the use of jargons and difficult words. Keep the words easy, sentences simple and paragraphs shorter…and if you add a bit of humour, it’ll surely bring you more readers.

4. Visual appearance

This refers to the overall outlook—theme, font style and size of the blog. Nobody would like to read an unattractive blog. You can make your blog visually-appealing by dotting it with relevant pictures and infographic charts where necessary. If your blog is lengthy, try breaking up large blocks of text into headers and sub-headers to make the blog look less daunting for potential readers.

Now the crucial part: You started regularly writing your blog but there is a pin-drop silence on your website? How should you bring more readers to your website to read your blog? Here are a few techniques bloggers employ to gain a wide readership. Click here to see an example of a visually appealing blog.

1. Optimize Your Blog

What does it mean? Optimization simply means how much chances are there for your blog to appear in search engine results. The more optimized, the higher the chances. How do you do that? Enlisted are some of the tools through which you can optimize your blog.  

a. Catchy headline: This means the title of your blog. This must include the keywords you want to target—it’s the first thing that determines whether your blog will be read or not. This should be ideally under 65 characters and must be catchy to attract the reader. A study shows that traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline alone. You can browse the ‘Blog’ section on our website here to have a look at some catchy headlines.

b. Meta Description:  This is the description below the search result on the Search Engine Results Page. It tells the reader what the blog is about before they click it. This should give a brief summary of your blog—within a sentence or two. For instance, the meta description of this blog is: “This article will show authors how to write a creative and search-engine-optimized blog.”

c. Use of keywords: Include keywords in your blog. The use of right keywords helps you reach to more readers. But how do you find the right keywords? First, think like a reader. What would your target audience search to reach your blog? You can also use google to help you. Write a word related to your blog and the suggestions will appear. Pick the keywords related to your blog and ensure these are mentioned throughout your blog [see the image below.

Secondly, there are tools designed for this such as Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, and Alexa which help you find the right keywords. The screenshot below shows the keywords related to ‘writing tips.’ Choose the ones with a high volume and low competition.

d. Anchor text: This is a link from your blog post to other parts of your website. Internal links are links to your own website. This will generate more hits to your site and show the search engines that readers are staying on your page for longer. This directly augments your domain authority—that you’re in the good books of search engines and they’ll recommend you more often.

2. Post it on Social Media

Post the links of your blog post to social media handles whenever you publish a new one. Once a week, post the links of your old blog posts too if they are relevant. Here’s an example of how you can share your blog post to your social media profiles:

3. Maintain Your Blog

a. Read and reply to your readers’ comments on your blog. If your readers feel valued they will visit your page more often. This will also give you an idea of what they expect from you.

b. Write your blog regularly. If you write one blog per month, chances are that your readers might lose interest. It’s not imperative to write long blogs, write shorter ones but write to them regularly. In the beginning, posting 2-3 times a week will give you the much-needed traction. Updating your page on specific days can prompt your regular readers on which day to visit your page.  

c. Add a call-to-action—asking them to share your blog, subscribe to your newsletter, sign up on your blog, introducing your book to them, and how can they buy your book.  

We believe this would work for now. If you have braced yourself for launching your blog, we wish you the best of luck. Happy blogging! 

But…what if you are not a published author yet? Are you someone who is working on a manuscript—or is it already done but you have apprehensions about the publishing process? We will help you in your pursuit. We are accepting submissions across all genres now. If you want to get published, begin your journey here.