177 Ways to Market Your Blog

Issue #918 May 23, 2015
Publisher: Joan Stewart

“Tips, Tricks and Tools for Free Publicity”

In This Issue

177 Ways to Market Your Blog
Email Training for Authors
Follow Journalists on LinkedIn
Hound Video of the Week

This Weekend in the Hound House:

My Garden Club’s annual Plant Sale is today. I’ll return home with a carload of more plants than I can possibly use. The extras will sit on the back lawn all summer and turn crisp. In October, I’ll vow to break this addiction to buying perennials I can’t use. Is there a 12-Step program for that?

1. 177 Ways to Market Your Blog

Too little traffic at your blog? Too few readers? Almost no comments?

You can spend the rest of this year experimenting with 177 marketing ideas from 59 experts, including me.

FirstSiteGuide.com invited us to each offer our best three ideas. As I read the entire list of ideas, three kept reappearing:

Write often.
Collect email addresses at your blog.
Offer solid content to promote your expertise. Or, as one blogger put it, “Give away the family jewels.”

Read the entire list here.

I promoted my appearance on this list to my own blog readers, and included a fun photo with it.

2. Email Training for Authors

You’ve convinced me.

I’m planning a course for authors on how to use email marketing to create SuperFans–that is, people who will buy everything you offer. The majority of authors who grabbed my free cheat sheet on this topic are pleading for this training.

The course will be five or six weeks and, if I can get everything in place, it will start the first week in June. I’m creating the outline now.

Many authors are making three major mistakes:

“I already blog so I don’t need email.” Your blog readers are arriving at your blog, and then leaving without telling you who they are! The ability to build a relationship with them is slipping through your fingers, along with a lot of book sales.
“I already email my list quarterly.” That’s too infrequent. Mail once a week, on the same day and at the same time. Train them to expect high-quality content.
“I’m still working on my book.” Great. But you can share the process of writing your book, and subtly promote it, long before it’s for sale. Don’t wait until your book launches, when you’re up to your ears in marketing tasks, to learn the technical details of how to build and use an email list.

Stay tuned. I’ll tell you more about the course in Tuesday’s tips.

3. Follow Journalists on LinkedIn

Journalists and bloggers troll LinkedIn Groups and use Advanced Search to find sources, trends and story ideas.

You’ll often get a response from them a lot quicker on LinkedIn than you will with conventional email.

This past year, LinkedIn has introduced a bunch of powerful tools and features that can help you generate publicity galore.

Wayne Breitbarth explained them all during the webinar I hosted with him several weeks ago. The video replay of “10 LinkedIn Changes, Workarounds and Apps” comes with a big bundle of cheat sheets and checklist, including a self-evaluation so you can score yourself on how well you’re doing on LinkedIn.

4. Hound Video of the Week

Let sleeping dogs lie. And don’t laugh too hard when you see them snoring, twitching and running in their sleep. My favorite is the one at 3:27.

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