How Can You Sell More Books Through Your Blog?

A lot of authors start blogs because of a vague notion that they should, that it’s part of “building a platform” and that it can help sell more books. Is it? Can it? Sure, though, for fiction authors in particular, one can argue that it might be more efficient (and financially rewarding) to put that time into writing more books instead.

Buuut, let’s assume you’re going to blog. How can you make sure your blog is doing everything it can to help you sell books? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Monitor which sales come through your blog in the first place

If you don’t know, you’re simply guessing as to your blog’s effectiveness. It’s true that Amazon and the other book sellers aren’t going to make this easy by telling you which sales originated from clicks on your blog, but if you sign up for the various affiliate programs out there and use those links, you can see how many sales come from your site each day (and you might make a few dollars from other things people buy at the same time, eh?).

You can also use services such as Bit.ly to see how many times certain links on your site are being clicked. If a lot of people are clicking through to an excerpt but nobody’s buying the book… you might want to choose a better excerpt. For WordPress users, you can go a step further and install the Pretty Link plugin. This lets you make trackable links, similarly to Bit.ly, but the links will appear to originate from your domain name. (People can be wary about clicking bit.ly links because they can’t tell where it’ll take them.)

2. Put the sales links to your books in a prominent place on every page of your blog

In other words, make them part of the menu. Use the cover art as well as text links and make the cover art clickable (since the earliest day of the web, we’ve been trained to click on pictures, so it’s an utter waste if clicking on your cover art only takes a person to a larger version of your cover art — or doesn’t do anything at all). Since Amazon is the biggest online store and accounts for the majority of my ebook sales, I make my cover links point to Amazon, but you could also point them to an excerpt on your own site (one that includes links to all the stores).

By having your sales links on every page, you can catch the eye of someone who surfs in via the search engines and lands on a post you did two years ago. It also ensures that people who want to jump right to downloading a sample of your book (or even buying it) can do so without hunting around your site. I can’t tell you how often I’ve simply said, “Forget it,” after clicking through about three layers of an author’s site and still not finding the Amazon link for the book. I also recommend that you not waste someone’s time by sending them to Bookbuzzer or some third party widget site. Your links should go right to the store where the reader has his/her credit card information stored.

3. When appropriate, link to your books from within your blog posts

If you’re lucky enough to get people to subscribe to your blog, remember that they may be reading your updates from a third-party RSS feed aggregator. That means they’ll only see the blog post, none of the stuff in the menu. Linking to the book right in the post lets them easily click to its excerpt or sales page.

Also, there are still scraper sites out there that will steal your content and post it as their own. These sites usually steal verbatim, links included. It’s unlikely they’re getting much traffic, but just in case someone stumbles across you that way, it’ll help to have a link back to your blog or to your book sales page in the content.

4. Increase traffic to your blog

This is the answer to a lot of questions, including, “Why aren’t I selling any books from my blog?” There are encyclopedias devoted to the subject, but the basics are:

Write content that’s useful for people (it should answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” for your visitor).
Work on getting more links to your site, via other blogs, social media sites, etc. The more links there are pointing to your site, the more weight Google will give it, and the more traffic you’ll receive from people’s searches. Of course, visitors can also surf in from the sites that are linking to you as well.

5. Make sure you’re writing for your target audience

Yea, yea, this blog is mostly about self-publishing instead of about fantasy or steampunk or the books my target audience reads, but I’ve found that there’s enough overlap (lots of writers are readers too) that I sell quite a few books via my blog. It also happens to be what I’m interested in (more so than reviewing new fantasy books or something of that ilk), so it’s working for me. That said, I also include excerpts from upcoming releases, do interviews with characters, and post snippets from cut scenes now and then. And it works for me.

My warning here is that you’re probably not going to get as many sales from writing about something unrelated to your books as you would if your books and your blog were closely linked.

What about personal blogs? Stories about the adventures of your kids and your dogs? Can they sell books? If you think you have a Dave Barry-like gift for making entertaining observations about the real world, these could certainly attract people and get them enthusiastic enough about your writing style to buy books. That said, you’ll probably find it easier to get links from other sites and increase traffic to your own by posting articles that are genuinely useful for people. In most cases when you see popular personal blogs by authors, they’re popular because the person had already become something of a celebrity from his/her books before jumping onto the blog bandwagon.

So, there you go, five ways to sell more books through your blog. Do you have any other suggestions for the authors in the house?

Related Posts:

What if You Don’t Have Time to Blog?
How to Use Your Blog to Sell More Books
Can Publishing a Podiobook Help You Sell More Books?