#174: Do Authors Need to Blog

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

One question you might have is, should I blog? Well, I'm going to talk about that in today's training. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author coach and the owner of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. And in this training, we're going to talk about a big topic, blogging. This has come up multiple times in my Author Audience Academy private Facebook group. The members I work with on a regular basis, several of them have been kind of stumped, saying, shelly, I don't know whether I should blog or not. Now there's two different scenarios. One of my members, she had been blogging for two years. And in her situation, I had a different set of questions and things for her to consider. So if you've been blogging consistently for at least six months to a year or even longer, then this is something I want you to consider. I asked her, first of all, what kind of traffic is she getting to her blog post? Is it working? So we want to look at your numbers. You want to look at what's working and what's not. And she said she gets a little bit of traffic to her blog. Not a lot, but. But she gets the most traffic when she sends an email to her list about a specific blog post. So I said, what does that tell you about what is working? What is working is her email list, sending emails to her list. And so she really had a huge burden lifted from her when I told her, you don't have to blog, you can have a different content marketing strategy. So blogging is just one form of content marketing. You could do a podcast like what I'm doing here and or YouTube videos. This will become a YouTube video, a podcast. It will also be on my blog. You don't have to do all of them, but you can do multiple things for your content marketing strategy, including here's a drum roll for you.

Including a perma free book. A perma free book is a perfect content marketing strategy for most authors and I into depth on how to set this up. The best way to really get visibility on Amazon with a perma free book. The type of perma free book to create, which is really important in my training author automation system. You'll find this in the platform module inside Author Audience Academy. If you're not yet a member, we'd love to have you join@authoraudienceacademy.com I've now opened up the monthly option so you can get started for as little as three $39 a month. And I would love for you to join us and to serve you inside Author Audience Academy. So for this particular member, it really made sense for her to put a hold on her blogging, put her time and efforts into her email list. But also she has been guest blogging on really big sites. She's been able to get featured on some really great sites in her niche. So, so I said, why not focus on the guest blogging and really bring people back to your email list through your bio, your byline, and also focus on your email list. She's also going to be setting up and publishing a perma free book. So does she need to blog consistently to have a content marketing strategy? Absolutely not. She's guest blogging and she's going to have a perma free book. But what she's found out is she's been sending more emails to her list. They've been responding really well to them and she's now considering turning some of those emails into blogs because they're already written. So that's one scenario. So if you've been blogging for a long time, look at your numbers. What is working? How many visitors are you getting to your blog? Are you getting new customers, new readers? Is it working? And if it isn't, is there something you can tweak? Have you been working on SEO? That's a whole other topic. Search engine optimization to really get people from Google searches. What have you been doing to promote your blogs? What kind of things could you do to increase the traffic to your blog? Or is it just time to not blog right now? I say that every author needs a website. Not every author needs a blog. Let me repeat that again. Every author needs a website. Not every author needs a blog. Why do I say that? Well, every author needs to have at least what I call a business card website. That's five to 10 pages on your website and you're just simply having like a business card. You have a landing page, you have an about page, a book page, a contact page, a page for them to sign up for your email list. Just a few simple pages. In my training website workout week is a seven day challenge that really helps you set up your website and blog optimally. And I kind of go through the pages I recommend in that training. It's Available inside Author Audience Academy. But not every author needs to have a blog. I know it's a pressure that a lot of authors feel because you're a writer and you think, okay, I'm a writer, I need to have a blog. If you're just starting out and you haven't blogged at all and you're just considering what content marketing strategy should I use, then I want you to think through a few things. Who is your target audience? This is key. If you haven't gone through my training in Author Audience Academy on target audience, I want you to do that first. If you're a member. If you're not a member, we'd love for you to join us@authoraudienceacademy.com you need to know your target audience. Once you know who your target audience is, need to really start doing some research. Where are they hanging out? Online? Where do they get their information online? I had somebody come to me and want me to help them set up a podcast. But first, before I charged him for the coaching it would take to set up a podcast, I said, who's your target audience? Why would I ask him that? I asked him that because if his target audience is not listening to podcasts, should he create a podcast for his content marketing strategy? No.

So find out. Where is your audience? Where do they hang out? Where are they consuming content? Where is going to be the most bang for your buck as far as your time goes for content marketing? A great content marketing strategy, I believe for almost any author is having a perma free book. That's a book that's permanently free on Amazon that you set up in a certain way for discoverability, for people to find you with Amazon searches and to get to know, like and trust you to purchase your other books, to sign up to your email list and to connect with you further. That is a content marketing strategy. It's free content you are putting out there to the world. It's just on a different platform. You're putting that free content on Amazon instead of YouTube or your blog or or a podcast. It's still content marketing. You don't have to feel guilty if you choose not to blog. Now. Blogging is a really great opportunity for people to discover you through Google searches. So it's really great to use search Engine Optimization SEO. I personally use the free Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. And that plugin lead you step by step on how to optimize your title, your content, your images, everything for keyword phrases that people are searching for on Google. So I highly recommend downloading and adding that plugin, the Yoast SEO plugin, and optimizing it. I personally use the Google Keyword Planner to do my keyword phrase research. So when you're doing keyword phrase research, a lot of times I'll just say keyword research. But authors get very confused and they think it's just one word, but it's actually a phrase. So for this particular blog post, the search phrase could be. Or the keyword phrase could be, do I need a blog? That could be that? Or, you know, do authors need to blog? It could be something like that, and then I can optimize my blog for that. What this does is it helps you get found in Google when people search that. Do I need to blog? Do authors need to blog? And then my blog post could come up for that. Now, you need to know that there's a lot of competition right now in blog posts. And so it's hard to rank for a lot of keyword phrases, especially if they're very popular. So you want to find keyword phrases that there is low competition, but there's still a lot of searches. There's. There just isn't as many of those keyword phrases available, but it's still possible. A lot of people still get a ton of free traffic from Google every day. The other thing is you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobile and other things as well. That goes beyond the scope of this training. But what I want to tell you is it can still be a very, very good strategy to have a blog because people can find you. What I like about YouTube is that it's much easier to rank for keyword phrases than it is on my blog. So that's why I love having a video that goes onto YouTube and have my blog, but then I also have my podcast. So because I have a team, my team is behind the scenes, editing, posting, publishing. I'm not doing all of that in order for it to go to all of the places. If I was doing this for by myself right now, I would probably just have my podcast audio only. But, you know, because I have a team, I can be in multiple places. But what, you know, where is your audience? Where are they hanging out? Where does it make the most sense for you to have your content marketing and like, what is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck as far as your time goes? We only have a certain amount of time. And I, like I said, I've already told you, my personal, personal recommendation is to Consider a perma free book a permanently free book on Amazon. I have an entire training that explains this. So many authors had aha moments and light bulbs go off during this training when I recorded it live recently. It's called the Author Automation System. In the core of that training, it's having a perma free book. Having a book permanently free on Amazon. So that training is available for you inside authoraudienceacademy.com when you sign up as a member, you'll get instant access to it in the platform module. Love for you to join us. You can ask questions in the Facebook group. If you're a member, that training is already there for you. So what do you think? Do you think that you need to blog or not? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear any additional questions that you have. This is a huge topic. I've only barely scratched the surface, but I at least wanted to address it because it has come up several times. There's no right or wrong answer. There is no one answer for every author. It really depends on what's working for you, on where your target audience is hanging out, where you can reach them the most effectively, and what do you have the time and resources to do. And so I hope you enjoyed this training again. My name is Shelli Hitz, I'm the owner of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Author Audience. I would like to invite you to attend one of my free trainings all about how to sell more books without being pushy or self promotional. It's called amplify youy message. Plus I will give you two free gifts just for attending. No credit card required. First you'll get my best selling book 9 Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform. And you'll also get my ebook titled List Vend 5 powerful emails you can use immediately to grow your business. These are basically fill in the blank style templates and they are yours at no charge when you join us for the training. You can sign up for my free training by going to shellyhits.com.

Amplify this training and the two bonus ebooks are free and I would love to help you so sell more books.