Why authors need blogs to sell books … the reason is simple. Think of your blog as the primary web address where you can promote everything related to your authorship: books; upcoming book signings and speaking events; videos; podcasts; photography or sketches; questions and answers for your fans; et cetera. And this is important. Because when you focus on increasing your blog’s ranking on search engines like Google, you not only drive more traffic to the blog itself. You also drive more traffic to each published book that you promote through your blog. More traffic equates to more chances for sales.

There are 12 fairly simple things writers can do to help this process along as discussed in this book shown to the right. Do some of these things on a regular basis, and you’ll begin to see an increase in your blog traffic which will most likely result in some extra book sales for you. Do all these things on a consistent basis, and the end result will be a significant increase to your blog traffic, readership, and book sales over time. Below are two great tips to start with…

Why Authors Need Blogs to Impress Google

Adam Clarke recently published a book about effective search engine optimization (SEO) through Google. Basically, Google wants to keep its user base happy through these three search quality factors: expertise, authority, trust (EAT). What does this mean to authors? It means that if you maintain a consistent reputation of publishing relevant and helpful content that shows your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness within your genre, you’ll rank higher and higher in Google’s search results over time. You prove your expertise online by means of digital (downloadable) books and other relevant information that is published regularly and often on ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Kobo, your own blog, and other appropriate websites. Your authority is eventually proven by the number of book reviews, backlinks, and social media followers, likes, and shares that you accumulate over time due to these publishing activities.

Why Authors Need Blogs to Attract Other Authors

When other authors post relevant and original content to your blog, everyone benefits. Guest posts enable you to provide your subscribers with more value without spending more time writing. And I’ll let you in on a couple secrets as to why I allow my guest bloggers to post links to the ecommerce sites where their own books are sold. One, I can attach affiliate links to their books that allow me to earn a commission from their sales. And two, doing so increases the chances of people clicking on both my book(s) and their book(s) on an ecommerce site. This increases the chances of those books appearing on each other’s ecommerce webpages under the “customers who viewed this item also viewed” and/or “frequently bought together” sections. This is one sneaky way you can make an algorithm work in your favour to increase both your sales.

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