Blog Post Leads to Book

Today I've invited Darcy Pattison to visit my blog and enlighten you on how her blog led her down an unusual but very common sense path. I thought you'd appreciate her thoughts in hopes you could use them in your attempts to master the blogosphere. Enjoy!     ~HOPE

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It’s funny how a blog post can lead to a book. Last year, I was studying the statistics for my Fiction Notes blog (http://www.darcypattison.com/ ) and realized that many people found my blog by searching for the keyword,
“book trailer.” So, I wrote a “link-bait” article about book trailers. Link-bait posts are those designed to attract a lot of links about a subject. My article listed “43 Sites to Inspire, Instruct and Share.” Soon, the article was receiving about 5% of the traffic to my site, a major portion for a single page. More than that, the number of page views was increasing monthly.

In other words, I used keywords to test a topic to see if there was enough interest to warrant something more than an article. I put up a poll on my site to determine what readers would like to see in a book about book trailers.

Once I decided to go forward with an ebook about book trailers, I knew I was in for a lot of work. I researched up-to-date articles about book trailer viewing, content, and creation. I studied examples of book trailers. And I put trailers in a wider context of marketing online and thought hard about what aspects of the online world affected the success or failure of a book trailer.

Then, I bought equipment, created a script and produced my own book trailer. Especially important to those who took my poll were reviews of various software programs. I concentrated on distinguishing among the products and finding those which would work easily and effectively. In other words, I put in hours of research, so my readers wouldn’t have to.

The result is The Book Trailer Manual and the blog, http://www.booktrailermanual.com/.

If you have a blog, make sure you’ve signed up for statistics on your website. I use Google Analytics and Statcounter because they are complementary. Statcounter gives real-time statistics, while Google has more bells and whistles, but you must wait 24 hours to see stats. Notice what keywords people are using to reach your blog. Write a round-up article of resources about that topic. Test the waters with a poll and other follow-up articles. Then, write the ebook.

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Darcy Pattison, (http://www.darcypattison.com/ ) author of both picture books, novels and how-to-write books has been published in eight languages. As a writing teacher, Darcy is in demand nationwide to teach her Novel Revision Retreat. Her latest how-to book is The Book Trailer Manual (http://www.booktrailermanual.com/).