Why You Should Be Blogging
Blogging does a lot of things for us self-published indie authors. First of all, it’s our own little piece of virtual real estate. Hopefully, we all have our blog on our website as I have previously preached. With a website and a blog, people have a way of finding our authorpreneurship business. It gives our company more legitimacy and findability. And our blog just compounds this because it gives us a loud voice like we’re screaming off of the top of the rooftops. Trust me, people notice stuff like this. And blogs make us more noticeable.
More people are going to view us as experts as well when we consistently blog. Consistently blogging improves our own knowledge and our search engine optimization (SEO) ranking so we can move higher up in Google searches. The more people hear our voice through our blog, and the more they find us in Google searches, the more they’re going to see us as experts in our field.
It’s just a natural progression. That’s how it works. We are getting smarter every time we blog. And… people admire people who stand up and say what’s on their mind. They also grow to respect people they are always running into in the expert circles of their niche, especially that one screaming from the rooftop with their blog.
The benefits of blogging don’t stop here, though. But, if they did, it would still be worth blogging anyway. Luckily for us authorpreneurs, there is a whole myriad of other benefits from blogging.
Consistently blogging consistently gives us content to repurpose. Anytime we don’t have to recreate the wheel, that’s a good thing. So, here’s one example. We take a 1500 word blog we just did, and we repurpose it by boiling it down to the nitty-gritty of an article consisting of only 350 words. This really forces us to zero in on the most impactful content of the blog. And now, with just 350 words, we should have a great article on our blog topic. This article is the same, but also much different.
With this 350-word article, we submit it to our town’s local newspaper. If we’re writing a 1500-word blog every week, we’re going to have tons of content to easily have a 350-word article every week as well for our local newspaper column.
Yes. Believe it or not, people still read newspapers. I’m constantly being stopped around my town with people telling me how they are reading my weekly column. This sort of makes me a mini-celebrity in my town and opens a few doors for me as well.
After we authorpreneurs establish ourselves with a regular blog that helps us produce a weekly column in our local newspaper, we can then approach other towns in our state to write for them. Then, go national. Trust me, this will get us a lot of exposure, and it’s all because we are blogging and repurposing our content.
Hey, I live in Connecticut, and I sometimes get emails from all the way across the county in California from people who tell me they are enjoying my newspaper column. I’ve even been told by people in Connecticut that they cut my articles out and mail them to their grandchildren in different parts of the country. Pretty cool, huh?
Another great strategy is to repurpose the content of our blogs in the opposite directions as well. Every 1500 word blog that we create can be rethought and repurposed into a longer piece of writing for a speech and even a chapter for our next book.
The awesome thing about repurposing our blog in this upward direction is that we are doing it with audience help and engagement. These are built-in future customers.
As we’re writing our blogs and interacting with our audience through their feedback about our blogs, we can both drill down on what’s important and expand it with more content for a speech. This makes writing speeches so much easier.
From the interaction we have with our audiences in those speeches with the Q&A part, we can repeat the process and both drill down on what’s important to our market and expand on it with more content for a chapter for our next book. This makes writing our chapters and our books a lot easier and faster.
This natural process stemming from our regular blogging saves us so much time. We don’t have to come up with brand new stuff every time we want to embark on our next content product. It’s such a natural progressing stemming from our blogs that brings our audience with us as they help us figure out what’s important to them and what will sell.
Remember, we’re not just writers. We’re authorpreneurs. We don’t just have a book, we have a business with multiple products and services.
There are so many ways to repurpose our blog content to create other content that will further our careers as authorpreneurs. There are also endless ways to cross-promote what we’re doing on social media with our blog. Done right, people who read our blog will follow it to our social media stuff. And people who find us on social media will travel to our blog.
All of this cross-promotion helps people feel like they know us better. Which means they will buy more of our products and services. And why wouldn’t they? After all, now they feel like they know us, like us, and trust us through all of their zigzagging through our content, products, and services.
A blog also opens doors to building a relationship with influencers. All we have to do is ask them if we can interview them on our blog. Even influencers appreciate the extra exposure a blog article can give them. So most of them will agree to be interviewed in our blog. And presto, we now have a relationship with an influencer in our niche. Pretty cool, huh?
To tell you the truth, it’s endless the possibilities and opportunities we have in front of us from just one simple blog. But, for our ball of fortune to start rolling in our authorpreneur journey, we have to first have a blog. So, if you aren’t blogging yet. Let’s take that first step, create a blog, and try to blog at least once a week.
Watch the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haGX9IXqYm8&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=68