Content Marketing Tips for Authors

Social Media for Authors Podcast

Welcome to the Social Media for Authors Podcast where you’ll get practical tips for marketing your books on the social web. I’m Frances Caballo, social media manager and author; you’ll find show notes and my in-depth blog posts at SocialMediaJustforWriters.com. If you’re a new listener, thanks for checking out this podcast. If you’re a returning listener, I’m grateful that you’re back. Now let’s get started.

New Recording Starts:

This week’s segment includes everything you need to know about blogging. In my weekly tip, I share some cool tools you’ll want to start using for your blog.

Let’s start with my weekly tip.

Blogging takes work, don’t you agree? You need to plan your topics, set up an editorial calendar and follow it.

Thank goodness there are tools to make blogging easier. No, there isn’t an application that will do the writing for you, but there are apps that will help you decide on your topics and research them for you. That’s huge.

Do you ever have trouble coming up with blog topics? It’s a common complaint.

Well, there are two great tools that can help you overcome that initial blog to writing blogs. First up is BuzzSumo. Once you sign up, type a word into the BuzzSumo search bar and the app will tell you how popular that keyword is and how often people are talking about it.

http://buzzsumo.com

This is good information because it can help you decide what you want to write about. If no one is talking about a certain a topic, then there’s no sense in blogging about it because people won’t care. But if you find a topic within your genre or niche that is lighting up the Internet, that’s what you should write about as long as it makes sense for your brand.

You can use the free plan and get all the information you need.

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator is another cool, free tool. Type in three nouns and the generator will create five blog titles for you.

For example, I typed the words Facebook, Twitter and writers. Three of the suggested topics were:

· 20 Myths About Twitter

· The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Had About Facebook

· What Will Writers Be Like in 100 Years?

The topics will also become your blog titles.

For me, Grammarly is a must-have tool. Once you sign up, you can either cut and paste your post onto Grammarly’s web page or upload a copy from your hard drive.

https://app.grammarly.com

Grammarly will immediately get to work checking it for grammar errors, redundant words and plagiarism. The cost is $139.95 annually, and I think that price is a steal.

Now for the second segment of the show …

I scoured the Internet and found some great posts related to content marketing. You’ll find links to all of these articles in my show notes on my Friday blog dated November 14, 2014. Okay, now for the blog posts:

First up, is a post from the blogging all-star team at Copyblogger titled Want to Hook Your Readers? Apply These 10 Principles to Create Captivating News Stories.

This is an information-packed post on how to blog with authority. Here are a few of the tips Copyblogger suggests:

· Always use the present tense.

· Make sure your text is thorough and succinct.

· Avoid jargon.

· Use quotes.

· Keep it real.

· Have someone else proofread your work.

· Lead into the story with 25 intriguing words.

· Quote a source to establish author and support claims.

The folks at Copyblogger have more tips in this blog post so you’ll want to check it out.

Next up are two posts by Adam Connell, aka Blogging Wizard.The first one is The Essential Guide To Must Have WordPress Plugins.

In this post, he reviews all the posts that every WordPress blogger should consider installing.

First, he suggests a couple of security plug-ins, Wordfence and iThemes security. They both look great, and you’ll need to talk to your webmaster to determine which one would be best for you.

Next up is BackupBuddy. Adam says it’s his go-to backup plugin and one of the first ones he installs on every WordPress website he builds.

Another great one that I love is WordPress SEO by Yoast. If SEO confounds you, get this plug-in. It will make the process easy for you, I guarantee it.

In his second post, How To Get Better Results From YourContent Marketing Efforts, Adam answers six questions to help people like us understand how we can get more eyeballs on the content we produce. I encourage you to look at this post because it’s comprehensive.

Finally, here’s a post I wrote called How to Blog Like a Pro. I joined a Google+ Hangout with Denise Wakeman and Rebekah Radice and wrote a post from my notes.

Quickly, here are Rebekah’s tips on blogging like a pro:

· Grab people’s attention.

· Don’t be too wordy.

· Focus your points and provide as many tips as possible. People love bullets with tips.

· Create an editorial calendar for the next three months but be open to accommodating new topics.

Rebekah turns the question around and explains the factors that can cause blogs to fail:

· Lack of consistency

· Lack of goals

· Lost of focus

· Not knowing what you’re passionate about

· Not establishing a blog calendar

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, check out my book: Blogging Just for Writers, which you can read about on my websitewww.socialmediajustforwriters.com/books and purchase on Amazon.

Thanks for listening to the Social Media for Authors Podcast. Be sure to check my blog at SocialMediaJustforWriters.com for in-depth articles every Monday. I’ll be back next week with more tips you can put to use. Until then, don’t forget to navigate to iTunes to rate this show and if you’re on Twitter, follow me at @CaballoFrances. Have a great week!