January 11, 2019
When you are preparing to launch a new book on Amazon, one of the most reliable ways you can make sure that you will have plenty of new visitors to check out your work is to guest post on blogs that command a relevant audience for your subject.
All you have to do is review who your ideal reader is, where you can reach this type of person, what their interests are, and why your book can benefit them. When you look at book promotion through this filter, it gets much easier to focus only on actions that will result in exposure and sales. Now you know where you or a virtual assistant can compile a list of contact information for blogs, podcasts, video channels, and other internet media outlets that represent your audience.
Targeting the Right Blogs
Targeting the right promotional platforms plays an essential role in how effective your promotion will be. If you’ve written a book about mending broken family relationships, you probably don’t want to guest post on a blog about teenage girls’ fashion. What you’d be looking for in that situation are blogs related to marriage, parenting, emotional issues, counseling, and more. No matter what you’ve written, there’s potentially a big range of tangential niches to belong to. Finding them all and contacting their owners could keep you busy for a while.
The most basic offers you can make to bloggers are:
A complimentary copy of your book for them to consider for review on their platform. If they agree, ask them if they’d mind also adding the review to Amazon and Goodreads. Remember, though, that Amazon prohibits requiring someone to leave a review in exchange for a free copy. This approach will probably only work on bloggers who have a history of posting book reviews or you know are avid readers. Remember that reading a full-length book, even if it’s a great one, is an investment of many hours of someone’s time.
A prewritten article about your book that they can post on their blog and attribute to you as the author. You can ask the author of the blog what subjects they are looking for in their guest content or offer them a predetermined selection of topics. In your guest author bio, you will have the chance to link back to your author site and/or your book’s Amazon page.
An interview with you, the author, about the process of writing your book or one of its specific themes. The blogger may provide you with a list of questions, or they may invite you to a real-time interview on their podcast, videocast, or radio show.
How to Approach the Blog Owners
When you reach out to blog owners, treat it like any other sales approach. Make it simple and make it direct, but also make it appeal to their emotions. Tell the blog owner right up front who you are and why you are making contact. Try to make it clear that you are familiar with their blog. When you’ve done that, describe what your proposed post will be about and say why you think it would be useful to the blog owner to accommodate it. They will probably want to see a pdf of your book or its Amazon listing. You can also send them to your website if you have one. If they like your style, they’ll be more likely to agree to a guest post.
You should also briefly research each blog before contacting its owner. Do they have guest post guidelines? If so, take care to follow them. Look at the posts they write themselves. What sort of subjects? What sort of tone and angle? It should be fairly easy to deduce what kind of content their audience would like.
You should strive to give some kind of personal and specific reason why your book is a good fit for their audience. Do your best not to make your message seem like a template you sent out to hundreds of other platforms, even though most will recognize the approach you are using. Think of things from your recipients’ perspectives. If you were running a successful blog or podcast with thousands of regular visitors, you would only want guests who had something valuable to say that would fit the brand identity of your platform. That impression is what you must convey in the short space of your outreach if you expect to get any positive responses.
Accumulating Visibility and Book Sales
When you post as a guest on other people’s websites, you are borrowing the market appeal of influencers who have earned the attention of their audiences. If the bloggers’ audiences overlap, they will receive repeated exposure to your name and book from multiple respected sources. This will only enhance your appeal in their minds. If your guest posts create backlinks to your website, your SEO receives a boost too. You will appear closer to the top of search engine results for terms related to you and your book, hopefully resulting in more popularity and book sales.
Every time you post an article to someone else’s blog, there’s a possibility that its followers will share your post on their social media profiles, re-blog it, or otherwise spread it around. There could be a viral network chain reaction, where more and more people keep showing it to more and more people.
About the Author
Gregory Diehl is the author of the new book, The Influential Author: How and Why to Write, Publish, and Sell Nonfiction Books that Matter. The book takes a unique and in-depth look at all aspects of book planning, writing, editing, and promoting for self-publishers.
Check out The Influential Author on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2RGTYDE
Learn more about Gregory’s work at: https://identitypublications.com
