I view guest blogging, e-mail Q&As that are published on blogs, recorded Zoom and Skype interviews, and other invitations that fall out of the internet and land in my inbox as bonus opportunities for information sharing.I realize, though, that not everybody sees it that way.

Writing a guest post or answering questions for someone else’s blog takes time — and time can be hard to come by.

Guest blogging goes both ways

That applies whether you’re writing for someone else’s site, or you’re inviting a person to write for your site.

In the same way that you might hesitate to write for another site, you might be reluctant to ask someone to make that same commitment to you.

But guest blogging — whether you’re contributing to someone else’s blog or inviting them to contribute to yours — is a powerful book marketing tactic. Here are four reasons why:

1. You will reach people you might not reach on your own.

When you contribute information to someone else’s blog, you’re sharing your message with people in your target audience who might not know about you.

If there’s overlap with some of your other marketing efforts — for example, if some of the people who read that blog also follow you on Twitter and Pinterest — all the better. That boosts your credibility while you get the benefit of message repetition.

2. The person who contributes to your blog will bring their fan base to your site.

When you invite another author to write a guest post or do a Q&A on your blog, the people in that person’s network will follow that author to your site. They’ll learn more about you and possibly become fans of yours, too.

That’s a real two-fer — you get content for your blog that you don’t have to create while you help expand your audience. What blogger doesn’t want or need both?

3. You will create and solidify important relationships that will support your activities over the long run.

Do you think that Nina Amir is my new BFF after inviting me to contribute to her site? You bet she is!

We are now connected in a way that isn’t superficial. I will go out of my way to support her as much as I can as a way to repay her for the opportunity to share information with her followers.

4. Providing Information on your blog from other sources is a reader service.

You’re giving your blog subscribers and followers access to information and insights they might not get elsewhere. Isn’t that the point of your blog?

Any time you can draw in helpful information from other sources, you’re providing your readers and followers with a service. They appreciate that.

Be open to the potential of guest blogging. It could open doors that have been stuck shut; it could expand your reach in new and exciting ways.

And, to become the kind of guest blogger who gets invited back, be sure to download our free Guest Blogging Cheat Sheet. It’s your shortcut to success.

What other reasons to guest blog would you add to the list?

(Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2012. It has been updated and expanded.)

A different approach to book promotion

By Nina Amir

Most writers hate promoting their work. They resist those pre-publication book promotion activities referred to as author platform-building. And they avoid post-publication book promotion or marketing.

If you can relate, I’ve got news for you. That attitude won’t help your book sell. And if it doesn’t sell, it won’t end up in the hands of readers. That means it won’t get read — and I know that’s not what you want.

You could muscle through — force yourself to build platform and promote. But there are other approaches that don’t require muscle and still increase your promotion comfort level and enhance your book marketing ability.

My book, Creative Visualization for Writers: An Interactive Guide for Bringing Your Book Idea and Writing Career to Life, offers a variety of exercises to help writers change their mindset about promotion. Try the following four exercises, which are revised excerpts from my book, to put that process in motion.

1. Evaluate your willingness to succeed with book promotion.

To develop a career as a successful author — or to develop even just one successful book — you must do more than write. In addition to your writer’s hat, you have to wear a promoter’s hat.

But are you willing to wear both hats? Or will you only wear a writer’s hat?

To find out, answer these two crucial questions:

1. Are you willing to be more than a writer? Why or why not?

2. Are you willing to do what it takes — whatever it takes — to achieve your goals? Why or why not?

Becoming a successful writer takes a ton of willingness.

• On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most willing, how willing are you to do what it takes to make your dreams real? Why?

• What are you willing or unwilling to do to achieve your creative writing goals? Why?

• What are you willing to do to achieve your creative goals?

2. Call on your inner sales rep.

Research shows that your inner voice either helps or hinders your ability to achieve goals. The affirmation “I can do it” keeps you moving forward if you are a courageous person, but if your inner voice is fearful, you’ll balk at taking that first step.

Your “self” is comprised of many “selves.” By this, I don’t mean that you have multiple personalities but numerous energetic parts that live within you and influence your life. They affect your decisions, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, relationships, and whether you achieve your goals and create your dreams.

Your “inner sales rep” loves promotion and marketing. This self’s preferred activity is selling, and it sees no conflict between art and commerce.

Call upon this self when you need to pre-promote your book by building your author platform. This “you” is happy to help attract a fan base or do whatever it takes to build your mailing list or social network following. This is the self you want in full force when you release your book, as it will gladly assist you with marketing.

If you want good ideas about how to promote yourself and your work, talk to your inner sales rep. And when you feel uncomfortable pitching your work or encouraging potential readers to buy your book, invoke the energy of this self.

Ask your inner sales rep the following questions.

• What promotion or marketing techniques would I enjoy most? Why?

• What promotion or marketing techniques would work best for me and my books? Why?

• What is the one thing I can do right now that will help me build a platform quickly? Why?

• What is the one thing I can do right now that will help me sell the most books?

3. See yourself overcoming obstacles.

The fact that you don’t like promotion creates an obstacle to successful authorship — unless you decide to pay someone to take over your book marketing. Even then, you are at a disadvantage. After all, the author is the best person to promote a book.

But you can overcome this obstacle with visualization.

Athletes visualize themselves achieving success as well as overcoming physical exhaustion, self-doubt, pain, and competition.

In the same manner, make a list of the obstacles you might encounter on your way to bringing your idea or dream to life — including resistance to marketing your book, promotions that don’t work, or failing to get on the Amazon bestseller list upon book launch.

Now visualize yourself overcoming each obstacle.

4. Set book sales goals.

It’s enormously important to have specific goals related to book sales. If you want to sell enough copies to become a New York Times or Amazon bestselling author, you need to know what that takes and create goals that can make that dream real.

Maybe becoming a best-selling author doesn’t interest you. You want your book to make a difference in a few people’s lives, leave a legacy for your kids, or boost your business. In these cases, the number of copies you want to sell — or give away — differs from that of someone who wants to become a best-selling author.

The average book today only sells 250 copies per year and three thousand in its lifetime. The average e-book author sells 560 books per year. You, of course, do not have to be average!

To ensure this result, set book sales goals to rise above the competition.

• I WILL SELL ______COPIES OF BOOKS PER YEAR.

• I WANT TO SELL ______ COPIES OF MY BOOK EACH QUARTER.

• IT IS IMPORTANT TO ME TO SELL THIS QUANTITY OF BOOKS BECAUSE_____________________.

Now make a list of all the ways in which you are willing to help get your books in the hands of readers. In other words, create your promotion plan

When you develop the willingness to help your book succeed, know how to visualize success, call on the parts of yourself that can help you promote, and have clear goals about your book sales (and why you want to sell those books), you’ll find yourself more inclined to promote your book before and after launch. That means your books will get read, which is every writer’s ultimate goal.

When you visualize success as an author, what does that mean to you? What do you see?

Tip of the Month

I always share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

This week’s tip is for those of you who know you should be writing book-related op-eds — opinion essays — for newspapers and other media outlets. Op-eds are a subtle, but effective, book publicity tool. They allow you to use your expertise or the knowledge you gained researching your book to express an opinion about an important topic in the news. (Learn more in “Using op-eds for book promotion” and “How to write an op-ed column or essay.”)

Authors using this tactic often ask me, “Is there a directory that lists newspapers that run op-eds?”

Yup!

If op-eds are part of your book marketing plan, bookmark the “Opinion Yellow Pages.” This site lists op-ed editors and their contact information for influential print and online media outlets. It will save you hours of research.

How to blog your way to discoverability

By Nina Amir

Writers write, but they don’t always want to blog—even though this activity involves writing. The reason is twofold: In their minds, blogging equates to promotion, and most writers would rather be writing than promoting. Plus, they think they don’t have time for both blogging and writing.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Your blog provides the best tool for ensuring you and your book get discovered by potential readers in your target market. Not only that, blogging provides a way to write and promote your book at the same time.

In fact, your blog is the best tool in your promotion toolbox. Let me explain.

Your blog increases the reach of your message

Your blog serves as the “primary station” from which you broadcast your message. Think of it like a radio station. You have something important to say, so you say it—write it—on your blog each time you publish a post.

Your blog broadcasts to the Internet and all your social networks. Think of these like satellite stations. Each one receives the message and then broadcasts it out again, giving what you say, or write, more reach and more visibility.

Your blog provides you with a way to reach your potential readers with your message. In the process, you strengthen your brand, gain new readers and subscribers, and gain authority and visibility online.

That’s the first reason a blog is such an amazing tool. Here’s the second.

Your blog increases the discoverability of your book

Every time you publish a blog post, something magical happens. The bots, spiders and crawlers—computer programs—from Google and other search engines show up to “read” what you’ve written. They catalog the keywords, or search terms, in your posts. The more often they find the same keywords, the more often they “file” your blog under those terms.

Here’s what that means for you: If you publish posts often and consistently, and if you focus your posts on one topic (maybe two), your site quickly rises in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After a while, the potential readers of your book who search for related terms find your your blog on the first Google SERP. Maybe you’ll even have #1 Google ranking, which means your site is listed first on the first page of a Google search.

When people do a Google search for anything, they typically don’t look past the first Google SERP—the first ten results. And they only click on links that appear relevant. If your site comes up on that first page and is relevant to their search, they click through to your site. If you advertise your book on your site, they not only find you and you and your blog but your book as well.

That is called “discoverability.” You want discoverability online.

How to get found online by readers

Your blog provides the simplest way for you to get found by readers online—or to get your book found online. To put this tool to use effectively, you need to do three things:

1. Write and publish posts regularly and consistently.
2. Blog only about one or two topics.
3. Share you posts on every possible social network consistently.

Write your book while you blog

Knowing all of this, you still may find the idea of blogging repulsive. I get it; it can take you away from writing your book. And you are promoting rather than creating art.

Look at blogging in a new way. See blogging as a way to write your book as you promote it.

Consider blogging your book, or writing it in post-sized bits that you publish on your blog and promote on your social networks.

When you blog a book, you publish the first draft of your book on your blog post by post. If you are like most bloggers, in the past you have published posts on a variety of topics. The only thing that links the posts is the fact that they are written by the same person or that you blogged about the topics or themes in your book. With the dual-purpose blog-a-book strategy, however, you publish short installments—300-700-word pieces—of your book on your blog. Each installment (blog post) comprises part of a chapter. As such, the posts work like a long series all focused on one topic or theme.

Blog visitors want to keep “turning the pages.” The continuous flow of related blog posts keeps readers coming back for more. And it gives Google a lot of content to catalog!

Promote as you write

That means your blog enjoys more return visitors and more page views. You’ll also gain new readers because you blog in a focused manner. This practice drives up your site in the SERPs, making it more discoverable. When someone searches for information on the topic of your book, they are more likely to find your blog—and your book.

The only thing you need to do to make that happen is:

• Write your book and publish it post by post.
• Take 10 minutes in the morning, afternoon and evening to share your newest post on your social networks.

As you do so, you will build author platform—you will pre-promote your book. You also will build the foundation for effective post-release promotion. And once you finish blogging your book and publish it, you can continue blogging to promote it.

Or blog your next book.

Stop complaining about promotion. Instead, embrace blogging. Turn your blog into the best book-writing, author platform and promotion tool available today.

Win a free printed copy of How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time by commenting below. We’ll randomly select one U.S. or Canadian commenter. (Sorry about the geography limits — blame the cost of shipping.) 

3 reasons you might want to wait to publish your book

By Nina Amir

You’ve got a book idea. Maybe you’ve even written the manuscript. You’re ready to move forward because you’re eager to get to the end goal: published author. After all, it’s your dream to become an author.

Ask yourself this question before you begin to write: Do you want to become a published author or a successfully published author? There’s a distinct difference between the two.

The average nonfiction book sells just 250 copies per year. Novels don’t sell a whole lot more. The average e-book sells only about 550 copies per year.

Successful authors sell an above-average amount of copies. Not only that, they outsell the majority of similar books in the same category, which is how they achieve bestseller status.

I bet you want to be a successful author.

When is the right time to publish?

With that in mind, you want to think twice about rushing off to self-publish your book or even to send off your proposal or manuscript to an agent. Be certain that now is the right time to publish your book. 

In fact, it might be better for you to wait and publish later if you don’t have all the necessary elements in place to create a successful book. If you do hurry to self-publish, you’ll end up sorry you did so when your book doesn’t sell. And if you want to traditionally publish, you’ll be disappointed when agents or acquisitions editors reject your project because they feel the time is not yet right.

So when is the right time to publish? That time arrives when you have everything in place to promote your book. That means you have:

• Built a strong author platform
• Created a sound promotion plan
• Written a book that is unique compared to the competition, necessary in its category, and provides benefit to your ideal reader
• Created authority or expert status 

The four necessities

Let’s look at each of these elements and why they are necessary to produce a successful book.

• An author platform: Your author platform provides the foundation from which you promote your book. In simplest terms, it’s a built in readership for your book. More specifically, it is a combination of visibility, reach, authority, and influence in your target market. Having a platform means you become visible to the target audience you want your book to reach, your audience sees you as having authority, and your audience engages with you at a high level, thereby giving you influence in that market. Ultimately, influence equates to platform. Thus, visibility, engagement, reach, and authority with your book’s target audience gives you influence in that market and allow you to successfully promote your book. Why? Because people listen to those with influence; they follow their recommendations.
• A promotion plan. A sound promotion plan builds on your platform, allowing you to target your potential readers in a variety of ways. Without a promotion plan, you rely solely on word of mouth or the general searchability or discoverability of your book. This is not a recipe for success. It’s better to have a plan comprised of both tried and true promotion tactics and new, creative, and out-side-the-box methods that increase searchability, discoverability, and reach to potential readers.
• A unique, necessary, and beneficial book. For a book to succeed, it must be marketable, and the elements of marketability include being different from the competition, filling a need in the market, and providing benefit to readers. If your book or idea doesn’t fulfill these criteria, it’s not yet time to go to press because it will be difficult to successfully promote the book (i.e. sell the book).
• Authority or expert status. You have to have the ability to write your book. If you are a novelist, you may only need a marketable idea and good writing skill. If you are a nonfiction writer, you also need credentials—expert status or to be thought of as an authority or thought leader in your subject area. Without this, you won’t be credible as an author, and that will make it difficult to promote you and the book. As such, the book becomes harder to sell. 

If you don’t have one or more of these elements, consider waiting temporarily to pursue publishing your project—if you want it to succeed—while you strengthen the necessary elements. The wait will be worth it in the end, because your book—and you—will stand a much higher chance of succeeding.

Which of the four necessities do you score the highest in — where are you the strongest?