Shawn Graham is the author of Courting Your Career: Match Yourself With the Perfect Job

Shawn is using a Wordpress.com blog as his marketing home base and doing a nice job of writing relevant posts which are RICH with information his book’s potential readers will be searching for on the web.  He’s also got an Amazon blog which he posts to regularly.  (BRAVO!!!)

On his Wordpress.com blog, posts such as “So you hate your new job” do a WONDERFUL job of spotlighting Shawn’s expertise. The first paragraph into the post, you can easily see that Shawn GETS IT! You’re instantly assured that this guy isn’t going to feed you some “pie in the sky” crap that doesn’t fly in the real world!

Shawn has also configured his wordpress.com blog to include an excerpt of the book and through two blogs has done an EXCEPTIONAL job of creating great posts and great content on his blog.  It shows… according to Amazon 79%  of visitors buy his book when they enter his page.

I’m thrilled to see he’s using an Amazon author blog in addition to his Wordpress.com free blog account.  See, I have previous experience with the free Wordpress.com blogs and it hasn’t been good. (Read more on that topic at Observations from a Quasi-Scientific Free Blog “Experiment” opens in a new window.)

Blogs are a GREAT publicity and promotion tool for an author… however, there are certain “mechanics” that have to be in place in order for an author’s blog to fulfill it’s role as the powerful marketing tool it has the potential of becoming.  Fortunately, Shawn is hedging his bet with his Amazon blog and other activities on Amazon.

Filed under: Author Web Sites, Marketing Basics for Authors, author marketing, author web sites, blogs as marketing tools for authors