Shelley Hitz - How to promote your book with a blog tour

How To Promote Your Book With a Blog Tour

Book Marketing Survival Guide Series Volume 2

Copyright 2014 A.Terry. All rights reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system without express written, dated and signed permission from the author.

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Table of Contents

Before You Begin

If you are just getting started on your book marketing journey, we highly recommend reading the Gear Up post on the Training Authors website before you begin this book. That post will give you a good understanding of the foundation needed to successfully market your book.

Check out our four tips for beginners here:

http://www.trainingauthors.com/book-marketing-journey/

Foreword

If you have already published a book, chances are you are looking for effective online marketing book strategies to help you sell your book. You have spent hours brainstorming, writing, editing, and publishing your book. Now what? Now it is time to let people know that your book exists. It does not matter if you have a great book if no one knows about it.

So, how can you gain more fans and sell more books through online marketing book strategies? I highly recommend that you consider a virtual book tour. What is a virtual book tour anyway? Basically, it is a blog tour where you share guest posts on different blogs to promote you, your blog, your products, and your books.

When A. Terry approached me about publishing this book on blog tours, I knew it would be helpful to many authors. Not only does she provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up your blog tour, she is sharing a book marketing method that actually works. Myself, A. Terry, and many other authors have found success using blog tours to promote our books.

The Top 3 Reasons Why Should You Consider Guest Blogging

1) It is free. Who doesn't want free book marketing, right? However, you do have to spend your time researching and writing the posts, but you don't have to pay for the advertising you will get from these posts.

2) It is forever. Your guest post will remain on that blog forever to promote you, your products and your books.

3) It is fun. Not only do you get tons of increased blog traffic, exposure, new fans, and new customers; but you also meet some amazing people in your field of expertise. I have found it fun to network and get to know other key players in my niche.

A Few Tips to an Effective Guest Blogging Tour

If you are going to invest the time into scheduling a guest blogging tour and writing the posts, you'll want to make the most out of this online marketing book idea.

Here are three tips:

1) Do your research . Your tour will be much more effective if you choose high traffic, popular blogs. You know that a blog is popular by finding out their Google page rank and Alexa ranking. In the beginning, you may still want to target a few smaller blogs, but don't be afraid to approach the authority blogs in your niche!

2) Provide high quality content . Be a great guest and provide unique, high quality content for your host. Make yourself stand out by putting your best foot forward.

3) Develop a plan . You will need to plan how long your tour will be and develop a schedule for your tour. If you are doing a longer tour, you will need tools to help you stay organized. Use what works best for you whether it's an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document or pen and paper.

I hope you not only get a lot out of the information in this book that A. Terry will be sharing with you, but that you also put it to action!

Wishing you success in your book marketing journey,

Shelley Hitz

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Part One:
Blog Tour Basics

Introduction to Blog Tours

So you wrote a book. Congratulations! But you didnt stop there. You edited it and re-edited it, only to go back and find more sections to edit all over again. You probably ran it by some beta readers or copyeditors for feedback. After that, you may have scouted agents, paid your way to writing conferences, and/or relentlessly queried publishing companies until you landed a publishing deal. Or you went the indie route and did all of the proofediting, cover design, and layout yourself, or you paid to have it done freelance.

Regardless of how you got here, you are now the author of a published book. If you are a new author, you may have been led to believe the hard work is over, that you can sit back, kick up your feet, and wait for those royalty payments to roll in. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but now that you have a published book to your name, it is your jobnot your publishers or your writing groups or your mothersto make sure your book reaches as many potential readers as possible.

If you are like most writers, your advertising budget either does not exist or suffers from very finite limitations. Wouldnt it be nice to find an almost boundless source of websites that would be willing to advertise your book for free? Welcome to the world of blog tours, where you can shell out a few free review copies, and maybe a prize or giveaway now and then, in exchange for promotion to thousands of readers in your niche market.

What is a Blog Tour?

It used to be that authors who wanted to promote their books would go on a book-signing tourstopping at bookstores, libraries, etc. with a trunk full of hardcover books just waiting to be sold. In a world where brick and mortar bookstores are floundering and readers are flocking to eBooks instead of print, authors are moving away from the traditional book tours in favor of blog tours (sometimes also known as virtual book tours). Individual blogs take the place of bookstores, libraries, and other physical locations where authors used to stop. Readers interact with authors in forums and comments instead of in book-signing lines. Authors do not take massive time away from their writing and everyday lives, nor do they have to pay hefty transportation expenses or hotel fees.

Unless you have seen one done, the idea of a blog tour might still sound a little daunting. Although there are several kinds of blog tours, they all share these two things in common:

1. Blog tours need blogs. The most common blog tours are set up so that a book is featured on a different blog each day. Usually, these blogs are book review sites dedicated to reviewing books in a certain genre. In addition to promoting the book, each blog might share a blurb or graphic. They might also include a link that you can click on to find all the other posts in the same blog tour. 2. Blog tours last a specific amount of time. Some blog tours are short, reaching just three or four blogs in a few days. Others can last longer, as long as there are enough participating blogs. A blog tour, however, has a definite start date and a definite end date. If you give away twenty-five review copies of your book to various bloggers and ask them to post a review at their convenience, you may be featured on several blogs and gain exposure for your book, but you have not set up an actual blog tour.

This book is written for authors, both traditional and self-published, who want to increase their exposure through blog tours. If setting up an actual tour sounds a little too daunting, nearly all of the information presented here can be applied to approaching individual blogs with requests for reviews. You dont have to do it large-scale, but if you want to, this book will show you how.

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