Well, maybe the blogs aren’t bad . . . it’s more that they’re ineffective.

Blogging can be a great way to showcase your writing skills and topic knowledge, but if you aren’t doing it properly, you could be wasting your time.

Here are three common mistakes I see on author blogs and how to fix them.

1. No images in blog posts.

A blog is the platform that hosts your articles. The articles themselves — your blog’s content — are called “posts.”

As Mridu Khullar Relph explained in the excellent “How to pick the right images for your blog post” article, images draw in more readers than blog posts without images.

You want people to read what’s on your blog, right? That’s more likely to happen if you have at least one interesting image in each post.

2. No subheads or bullets.

Because of the way we read online, web-writing is different from book- or magazine article-writing. Our online content needs to be skimmable.

Help our eyes by “chunking up” the text in blog posts with subheads. When it’s appropriate, use bulleted or numbered lists, too. In fact, don’t write a list, tips, or how-to steps without using bullets or numbers.

We need these visual elements to pull us through your article.

3. No social sharing buttons on author blogs.

Social sharing buttons or icons serve a couple of purposes.

First, there’s the obvious reason to have them installed on your blog — they make it easier for people to share your content. More shares equals more traffic. More traffic means your site will show up higher in search engine results. It also means more people will discover you and your book.

Social sharing toolbars with counters also provide what marketers call “social proof.” It’s evidence that your blog’s content is popular. We are influenced by others’ behaviors, so when we see that others have shared your content, we think it must be good.

Think of it as the online version of “Monkey see, monkey do.”

As an example, my blog uses a social sharing bar at the top of each post and on the far left. Notice how the side bar stays with you as you scroll so that no matter where you are on the blog, you can share a link to it with a variety of social networks.

This one is a WordPress plug-in called Sassy Social Share. Others include Digg Digg and AddThis.

I prefer social sharing bars that display the share count. Site visitors can see how many times the post was shared, which makes it another form of social proof. In addition, I can tell at a glance whether people responded to the content by sharing it. I then work to provide more content on those topics that seem to be popular.

Find an option that you like and install it on your site immediately so that your fantastic content gets seen, shared, and informally endorsed by others

A few resources

If you’re a beginning blogger — and even if you aren’t, but your blog looks like you are — here are a few resources that might help you out:

Problogger: Check out the resources on the site, subscribe to the newsletter, and bookmark the blog. You’ll get great information from a blogging Ninja.

Copyblogger: Subscribe to the blog; read up on past articles. While the blog is often about how to write well (you’ve figured that out already, right?), there’s lots of information here that can help you improve the experience for the reader who visits your blog.

Hubspot: This link takes you to a post with mistakes to avoid plus a link to download six free blog post templates. Use the search box on the site to find more helpful blogging content, too.

How to Start Blogging: A Definitive Guide for Authors: Jane Friedman’s article is loaded with advice that’s relevant to you.

Author blogs can be powerful and influential. You’ve got great material on yours.

Make sure you’re presenting your content in a way that encourages people to read and share so your author career flourishes. .

What “here’s how to do it” tips would you offer authors for their blogs?

(Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2013. It has been updated and expanded.)

Through that, I discovered a soon-to-be-published book that I immediately pre-ordered.

That single article was my introduction to the power of Medium, a publishing platform that everyone from a senior public relations pro at Amazon to the folks at OK Cupid use to make announcements or share opinions.

How do you get started there, what are the best practices for content providers, and how can you use Medium.com as an author?

Medium demographics

Before you do anything, make sure your ideal reader is using that site.

There isn’t much available about the platform’s demographics, but I did find specifics from 2015. The source, Ryan Huber, attributes this information to nativeadvertising.com:

“Medium’s audience is made up mostly of the sort of educated, upwardly mobile, and media savvy people who like to ponder the future of technology or the cultural significance of the Coachella music festival.

“A full 95% of Medium’s readers are college graduates, and 43% of them earn six figures or more. Even better, from an advertiser standpoint, these readers are also young, with half of them in the coveted 18–34 demographic and 70% of them being under the age of 50.”

Getting started

View what follows as something of a cheat sheet. I’ve curated links to the most relevant content others have written on the subject already. We can use them to learn together.

Digital marketing strategist Chloe Mason Gray shares best practices in “The Marketer’s Guide to Medium” on Neil Patel’s blog. It’s an excellent starting point once you’ve decided that Medium is a good fit for your book marketing plan.

She explains how Medium can support your business and how to use it effectively. Screenshots of examples are especially helpful.

In “So, you’re new to Medium…” by Justin Cox, you’ll learn about the basics as well as how to get paid for your content. (Scroll down in that article to “I Want to Get Paid for My Writing.”)

I learned about submitting content to “publications” — a smart move! — in Nicole Bianchi’s helpful “getting started” post, “How to Use Medium to Share Your Writing and Grow Your Email List.”

Bianchi’s article also includes the essentials for getting started.

How do authors use the site?

Authors might use Medium to connect with readers, showcase their writing skills, build influence, or build buzz for their books.

In “13 Ways for Authors to Engage on Medium,” Kate Lee offers examples as well as ideas that range from publishing an excerpt to hosting a contest.

“How to Use Medium to Promote Your Author Brand” by Derek Haines has several helpful suggestions. Like many other articles I’ve read about Medium, this one encourages you to repost your blog content on your Medium account.

While Haines says it won’t hurt your SEO (search engine optimization), I think I’ll still plan on tweaking my blog posts before re-publishing them on Medium. Every time I revisit something I’ve written, I can usually improve it.

Take the time to learn how to use it first

I strongly recommend reading these and other articles before starting to blog on Medium. The more you know before you get started, the fewer costly mistakes you’ll make.

Study how others are using it. Find examples of people who have figured it out and analyze why they’re successful.

Consider taking a class, too. Here are affiliate links to two courses on Udemy, “Medium Blogging for Beginners” and “Medium Blogging Masterclass.”

Finally, before incorporating Medium.com into your marketing plan, make sure it’s a good fit for your target audience, goals, and skills.

Don’t start creating content on the site simply because you’ve heard others are doing it. It needs to be a good fit for you and your book.

Are you using Medium already? Please share a link in the comments so we can see what you’re doing. 

You just have to have them.

Images serve several purposes on blogs. First, they make each post much more attractive and readable. They draw the visitor’s eye to your content and, with long posts, break up the text so it’s less overwhelming.

In addition, they help your blog post get found by search engines when you have the right keywords in the image title and the “alt text.” The “alt text” option in WordPress gives you another opportunity to add the keywords to your image.

They also draw more attention to your post when you and others share links to your content on social media.

Quality counts

Your images won’t help if they aren’t top quality, though. And I say that knowing that the best-known stock photography sites charge more than the typical author wants to spend on blog post images.

Fortunately, several sites offer quality stock images for free. I only discovered them when my favorite paid image source, DollarPhotoClub.com, went out of business. I started researching affordable alternatives, fully intending to pay for access, when I stumbled upon several sources of top quality free images.

Why pay $100 or more a year when there are so many quality options that don’t charge?

Free stock image sources

Here are a few of the best free stock image sources. Use the search box on each site to search for the types of images you should be using in your blog posts (for example, I typed “books” into each search box). That will help you determine which site might be the best for your blogging and social media image needs.

1. Gratisography

Photographer Ryan McGuire adds new photos every week but with just one photographer, the selection is more limited than it is on other sites.

2. Kaboompics

This free photo site has a particularly impressive selection of images for a wide range of topics. The home page alone inspires me to find and use more images.

3. Pexels

I found Pexels.com when a service I write for recommended it as an image source. I like that it prompts me every once in awhile to donate to the photographers via PayPal. I’ve been using this site the most but I’m about to try Kaboompics next to see if there are more image options.

4. Picjumbo

Photographer Viktor Hanasek lets you search his vast library of free images, opt for premium membership ,or even purchase the All in One Pack of every image from the site. An email subscription will get a selection of new photos sent to your inbox weekly.

When searching on this site, use the search box in the upper right of the screen. Don’t use the DepositPhotos.com search box if you want free images — that search box will take you to a paid image site.

5. Pixabay

Pixabay offers photos plus illustrations and videos, which makes it even more useful. You can also filter search results by type, color, category, size, and more.

6. Unsplash

With more than 50,000 free images, you’ll have plenty of options here. You can also subscribe to get an inspirational collection in your email each month.

While these free stock image sites offer all types of photos, you can also use a search engine to find sites that provide photos for specific niches that include food and travel.

4 tips for using images in your blog posts

These six sites will help you find exactly what you need for your blog. Before you start downloading images, though, make note of these tips for using them effectively. (These are the kinds of things nobody tells you when you start blogging.)

• Read this helpful guest post on this site, “How to pick the right images for your blog posts.“
• Check the rules on the image sites to make sure you understand the terms. For example, some might require you to provide source attribution.
• Resize the images. Big images cause pages to load slowly. You can resize in Microsoft Paint (a standard accessory on Windows computers) or with the tools at online sites that include BeFunky.com.
• Keep your author brand in mind when selecting and editing images. The mood evoked by images should match your website’s mood. And, when adding text, use colors that are compatible with your site colors.

Before you start adding quality images to your blog posts, check your Google Analytics account to see how many people are visiting your site. Check again a couple of months after you’ve started adding images. It’s quite likely that you’ll see an increase in traffic.

You will probably see a boost in your social media shares, as well.

What’s more, you might even enjoy the process of searching for — and finding! — just the right image for each post. I know I do.

What are you doing that’s working for your blog? Please tell us in a comment. 

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 month it’s the free “Build Book Buzz Book Marketing Plan Template” you can download and use immediately.

This easy-to-use fill-in-the-blanks template comes with complete instructions for filling it out. Available in PDF format, this document has everything you need to create your blueprint for book marketing success.

Plan ahead for your book’s success by downloading and using your free “Build Book Buzz Book Marketing Plan Template” immediately.

Vivian Kirkfield is my poster child for what’s possible for self-published authors. In 2010, she self-published an award-winning parent-teacher resource book, Show Me How! Build Your Child’s Self-Esteem Through Reading, Crafting and Cooking; in 2016, she signed a contract with a traditional publisher for her first children’s picture book. That didn’t just “happen.” Vivian worked hard to make it happen. She is passionate about helping kids become lovers of books and reading and hopes that the stories she writes will have kids saying to their parents, “Read this one again, please!” Learn more about Vivian on her blog, Picture Books Help Kids Soar; follow her on Twitter, and connect with her on Facebook.

4 children’s book author blogging ideas

By Vivian Kirkfield

At the end of 2010, I jumped into blogging. I had just published a resource guide for parents and teachers. And I planned to write picture books for children.

I figured I should start a blog, but I knew nothing about blogging. Fortunately, I took Sandra Beckwith’s Book Marketing 101 for Nonfiction: How to Build Book Buzz e-course and I learned a lot. Sandy and the other experts I spoke to had the same advice: Blogging is a great way to connect with your audience.

But who would that audience be?

• Blogging as a children’s writer, you want to appeal to parents, teachers, and librarians . . . if you write for older kids, you might want to think about connecting with them . . . for younger kids, you can provide activities or printables (like coloring pages) that parents can download.
• You also want to connect with other writers. Writing is a solitary occupation and blogging can offer a writer the support and encouragement of a community of like-minded people.

So knowing this, what should you blog about? Here are four children’s book author blogging ideas:

1. Book reviews

Depending on the genre you write, review a book on a regular basis. Your recommendation will help parents, teachers and librarians. And reading books in your genre will help you become a better writer.

Some bloggers organize blog hops with link ups that help them connect with other bloggers while they gain new visitors to their blog. What type of blog hop would be fun for you to do?

2. Author/illustrator interviews

Who doesn’t want to get a peek inside the life of a favorite author or illustrator?

Parents, teachers, librarians, as well as fellow writers, will appreciate finding out how an author or illustrator went from idea to published book. I’ve had a series called “Will Write for Cookies” for the past several years. I reach out to friends who are published authors or illustrators.

I also connect with authors of books I love and authors I meet at conferences. I develop a relationship by leaving comments on their blog or Facebook page.

You’d be surprised at how happy authors are to appear in an interview on your blog—it’s a win-win situation because they are getting some exposure for their books.

What spin could you put on a series?

3. Writing prompts, contests, and challenges

If you are looking to connect with other writers, most of them can’t resist a writing challenge or a contest.

Several writers I know run challenges that grew out of their own needs. One writer wanted to generate more story ideas so about eight years ago, she organized Picture Book Idea Month. PiBoIdMo encourages writers to come up with a story idea (or title or character name) every day in the month of November.

Each day, she has incredible authors, illustrators, agents, and editors who write a guest post with inspiring thoughts and great writing tips. And at the end of the month, she awards prizes.

Another friend did that challenge and wanted a way to motivate herself to turn those ideas into stories. So she organized her own challenge to encourage writers to write a picture book draft every month. She started it in 2012 and called it 12×12 and now she has hundreds and hundreds of followers who register every year to participate.

What challenge could you start?

4. Book content and teasers

Most picture book writers I know don’t post their stories on their blogs because of intellectual property issues. But if you have a book coming out, you might want to post a trailer for it.

If you connect with other bloggers, you might arrange a virtual book tour, where other bloggers showcase you and your book or where you host them on your site. This helps widen your audience.

If you are a nonfiction writer, you could write about the topic of your latest story. This would appeal to other writers as well as parents and teachers. My debut picture book is about a former slave who received the first U.S. patent awarded to a black woman.

I plan to highlight an invention every month that would appeal to kids—Silly Putty, Slinky, Playdoh—the stories behind these inventions are fascinating and would appeal to parents and teachers as well.

What content are you comfortable writing about?

I think children’s writers make the best bloggers. Just keep your content fresh. Leave comments on other blogs. And most important of all, have fun.

What do you blog about on your site?

How to pick the right images for your blog posts

By Mridu Khullar Relph

When I was a lowly sub at a magazine many years ago, I sometimes wrote and edited as much as half of this (small magazine’s) entire content. Yet, if you asked me where most of my time went, I’d tell you that I spent about half my day researching, writing, and putting together stories and the remaining half on presentation.

That’s right, I spent half my time, each and every day, coordinating with the designers, discussing layouts, helping identify text that needed to stand out on the page, playing about with different fonts, analyzing all the different covers the designers had come up with and vocalizing why they worked or didn’t, and mostly, sourcing the right images.

In your blog, too, images are important. It’s been shown repeatedly that bright, interesting, and relevant images tend to draw in more readers than blog posts without images or those with boring and overdone ones.

Here are six ways to ensure you’re picking the right images for your blog that help to challenge, inspire, and surprise your readers.

1. Don’t be too literal. 

A couple of months ago, when our own Sandy Beckwith guest posted on my blog about nonfiction platforms, I chose this picture of a guy getting ready to jump because not only did it signify the “literal” platform, but it captured what most writers feel when we’re talking about building a platform– that they have to take a deep breath and just jump.

2. Pick people over things. 

When I started working at the magazine I mentioned above, the leadership changed. The new editor was charged with taking the magazine from a technology magazine for geeks to a lifestyle magazine for people who wanted to know how to pick their next gadget. The first thing he did? He put models on the cover.

People respond to people. It’s human nature. So given the choice between a dozen envelopes ready for the mail and a baby chewing on a marketing book, you now know which image to pick.

3. Choose beauty over accuracy. 

Images aren’t about fact, they’re about feeling (unless you’re publishing a newspaper). Take this post on the levels of commitment by Jeff Goins, for instance. It features a beautiful image that draws the reader in immediately and works perfectly for this post. But if you looked at the image in isolation, “commitment” isn’t the first word that would come to mind.

4. Make it personal. 

There are blogs I’ve been reading for years where I can’t tell you one thing about the person writing it. Others where I feel like I know the writer personally. Guess which one I’m going to trust more? Once in a while, make it a point to post a picture of something that makes you uniquely YOU.

For instance, I write a regular “What I’m Reading” post on my blog in which I always get my dog, my cat, and now my baby, to post with one of the books I’m reading. The cuteness factor is really high and readers absolutely adore it.

5. Bigger is better. 

Some bloggers like to have tiny images on the side, which is fine if that works for your content or your design. And it can be, like on this blog, more important to keep readers focused on the words.

But if your blog is more in a narrative conversational style like that of say, Michael Hyatt, make your images “pop.”

6. Match the tone of your pictures to the tone of your text. 

If you blog about serious topics, say addiction or crime, you need to use serious images, no cats, dogs, or monkeys allowed. But if you’ve got a more personal style, like my own, and you talk to your readers regularly and they feel like they’re just hanging out with you, you need a different set of pictures entirely. As writers, we focus so much on voice that we forget how much images need to connect with that voice.

How much thought do you give to the images you use on your blog? 

Why has that post generated more traffic to my site than just about any other post? Because it’s about Bill O’Reilly and his enormously popular book. When people search for O’Reilly or his book title, my post shows up in the search engine results.

Ah . . . the power of SEO.

So, when my friend with a new nonfiction Kindle Single grumbled that Stephen King’s new Kindle Single, Guns, bumped his book down a notch on the bestseller list on Amazon, I urged him to blog about it. (Kindle Singles are books that are longer than a long magazine article but much shorter than a book.)

Blog about trending topics

If there’s a development in your book’s topic or your publishing genre, I encourage you to blog about it immediately, too. Here’s why:

1. It will drive traffic to your site. Your blog post on a news story will be found in search engines if you’ve written the post so that the words people will be searching for are in your title and/or the first one or two sentences of your post. (This is how SEO — search engine optimization — works.)
2. Your post could generate publicity. If you’ve offered a counter-intuitive perspective or expressed your opinion on a breaking story particularly well, your blog could be quoted in the press or you could be interviewed by the media.
3. You will look like hot stuff. For example, if Stephen King has written a Kindle Single, that says a lot about other nonfiction Kindle Single titles and authors, doesn’t it? A little bit of his star power is rubbing off on them. In addition, if you’re writing about a publishing development that’s breaking news, you look like you’re plugged into your genre. That’s reassuring to readers (and publishers).
4. You will boost your platform. People who discover your blog after finding you when searching for the trending story could become fans. What author doesn’t welcome the opportunity to acquire more fans?

If you have a reaction to a trending news story and can contribute to the conversation, blog about it. Compare the traffic to that post with others and see if it made a difference. If it did — and it probably will — do more of it.

What has been your most popular blog post, and why?