Using Your Blog to go Fishing for Book Buyers

Author’s note:  When I created this blog post years ago – the only way to quickly and easily create a search engine friendly website was to launch a blog.  Blogs at that time were “cutting edge technology” which made it easy to publish your content to the web.   The only problems – blogs are “ugly”.

That was then – and this is now.  There’s now a new way to create a beautiful search engine friendly website – did I mention it’s free?  Click here to learn more about this fabulous web publishing platform.

Marketing your book is VERY similar to process of going fishing.

If you’ve ever fished, you know it’s possible to sit with your line in the water for HOURS without so much as a single interested “nibble”. What’s even more frustrating is to watch nearby fishermen pull in fish and fish as you sit just a few yards away. The question which BEGS to be answered is this…”What is the successful fisherman doing that I’m not?”

Of course, you can ask the fisherman… but people who fish are sometimes weird about sharing that type of information. If they tell you, then EVERYONE will know and their “secret spot” or “secret method” won’t be secret anymore! (By the way, this isn’t too terribly different than the mentality that affects many successful authors and/or business people!)

Since I’m a ‘blog pusher’ by trade, I’ll share with you a VERY effective marketing analogy which I call “Using Your Blog to go Fishing for Book Buyers”.

It’s not hard to convince authors that they need a web site. They know the web is a powerful marketing tool for them so it’s very common for an author to already have a “regular” static web site. They use this web site as a virtual “store front” where they take orders for their book and present their availability to speak. This web site (one that is already acting like a store front for the client and is processing orders) takes on the role of a “fishing boat” in our analogy.

Unfortunately, most authors (and most business owners) with whom I’ve worked didn’t understand what they were getting when they launched their initial web site.
Instead of recognizing that they were purchasing a vehicle to take them to the fish, they thought they were buying a fish market. They arrive at my practice frustrated and confused. Thus the creation of this analogy.

When you go out on the water, no matter what type of fishing boat you’re using, you don’t expect the fish to LEAP into your boat and throw themselves into the live well. Instead, you bait your hook and put it in the water where the fish are so you can “present” the bait to the fish in the course of their daily living.

You also need to choose what bait you place on your hook by the type of fish you wish to catch. The type of fish you’re targeting determines your choice of fishing pole, line and even the size of your hook.

Your blog performs the same function as a fishing pole, line and hook when you take a boat out on the water to fish. In our analogy, your blog is the hook and your blog entries or “posts” are the bait.

You wouldn’t go fishing without using a fishing pole, line, hook and some bait. You certainly wouldn’t go fishing without first baiting your hook.

Now, an ESSENTIAL part of the whole fishing game is putting your bait where the fish are. There are two ways to do that with your blog:

1. Have your blog posts show up in searches done on keywords your audience is using when searching for your book using the search engines
2. Have your blog show up in places where book buyers gather.

The best author web sites allow you to do both of these options extremely well and allows you to create a web presence that contains both posts (bait) and pages (boat).

You need an author website that is  search engine friendly. That means with every post, you’re buying another “ticket” in the Google lottery. More tickets means more chances to “win” and appear in a search.

Just as the grizzled old fisherman doesn’t need technology to catch fish… if you’re an grizzled old internet pro you can definitely catch “fish” using a web site. However, for the rest of us, there is technology which makes fishing easier for the novice and not so grizzled.

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