It
took me five-and-a-half years to make my first million.
A
million clicks, that is.
My
blog, www.BookMarketingBuzz Blog has become one of my proudest accomplishments even though it hasn’t earned
me one red cent. Maybe I’m a glutton for
punishment, but I enjoy blogging. With
over 2,200 posts to my credit, I’m a veteran of writing probably the equivalent
of a dozen and a half books. If the average post is 600 words long, we’re
talking over one and a quarter million words.
I
know many authors who blog infrequently, if at all some are successful
regardless of their blogging, but the ones that blog and tend to be good at other
marketing efforts, including social media, speaking, and direct sales.
Blogging
offers many positives:
1. Branding
2. A
way to voice a view or share an idea.
3. An
easy way to create immediate content that you can use for posts on Facebook and
Twitter.
4. A
lead generator for sales of your book or other services and items.
5. Showcases
your writing skills.
There
are drawbacks to blogging
1. It requires time, effort, and dedication to regularly think up posts, write,
research and edit them.
2. Once
you post a blog entry, you feel the urge to share it on social media platforms,
which sucks up more time and brain power.
3. It
becomes addictive and a burden.
When
you blog, you look for instant gratification.
You get a high when the clicks take off – and you feel depressed when a
post is met with little reaction.
I’ve
thought about getting advertising for my blog, or selling people’s books on it,
or making it more commercial. Though
there’s nothing wrong with it, I just don’t feel I want to go that route. I want to be pure and clean on the editorial
side. I don’t have to vouch for a
product, and I don’t have to clutter my words with sales pitches. The only thing promoted here is me.
I
do have blog-envy when I hear people register some crazy traffic numbers to their
blog but I conclude this:
Only
a tiny handful actually draw big numbers.
Many
people fake their claims or use a bunch of tricks to jack up their numbers.
Some
blogs lend themselves to more traffic than others; for instance, more people
will read a blog about losing weight, having better sex or making more money –
or about a celebrity – than they will about book marketing.
I
should encourage fewer people to blog so it frees up space for me. There are so many blogs out there,
cluttering the Internet. Am I part of
the free content problem? All of these blogs, podcasts, webinars, books, audio
downloads, videos, and free content as competing for people’s time and
attention when they theoretically could be buying and reading books.
I
feel like my blog is a non-profit. I
genuinely love books, I feel for the plight of all writers. I fiercely defend
freedom of speech and I advocate for literacy.
A million clicks into this – with
no ka-ching to show for it – and I feel great.
Blogs
didn’t exist when I was growing up and only became popular in the past decade
or so, though early Net adopters blogged as long as 20 years ago, first on
Links.net and then as weblogs. 1998 marked the first known time of blog on a
traditional news site. The platform that
I use, Blogger, was launched in 1999. By
mid-2006, according to Technorati, there were 50 million blogs. As af 2015, according to wpvirtuoso.com, there
are over 152,000,000 blogs. A new blog,
globally, is created every half-second.
Blogging
is one of the best things to come from the Internet revolution. What would be even better is if these blogs
were commoditized. Maybe people should
pay something for accessing all of this free content, but it would be very hard
to figure out a fair price and disbursement system. Blogging simply has its own reward and true
writers know this.
Go blog away and let the clicks begin. Once you start, you may never stop.
Go blog away and let the clicks begin. Once you start, you may never stop.
Please Click On The
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Brian Feinblum’s views,
opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his
employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.
Named one of the best
book marketing blogs by Book Baby
http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs
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