I’ve been writing my blog here on WordPress since 2012! Over 10 years. Amazing. What have I learnt about successful posts and ways of driving traffic to your blog.
What has worked for me?
- Book reviews : put simply, if you share the love of books and write about the books you read it will draw traffic. A bit of good karma maybe, but as your fellow author is encouraged by your honest and positive review, then they and their followers will share it and voila!
- Offer to be part of Book Tours: much like the above, there is a buzz about being part of a Virtual Book Tour, whether you are offering a Cover Reveal or a full blown review. It takes time, yes, but it draws folks to your site, excellent if the book is in a genre that you write in.
- An enticing title: If you get your fellow bloggers intrigued by your title then they’re hooked. My largest no of readers ever was for the title Can You Snuggle in Bed with a Kindle? Now, that tells you how long ago the post was published. My most recent was I Admit I’m a Murderer with Intent! ~ I was actually talking about the greenfly on my lupin tree, but it certainly hooked readers. I hope they were amused rather than disappointed.
- Background information to your novel/ novels: I had some successful series on each location of my novels called virtual tours. These brought traffic on the long term, far outside the blogging fraternity.; potential readers.
- Series: The above series kept readers hooked because they were interested to find out more but a recent series where I interviewed successful indie authors went down well.
- Extra Historical detail: very much as the above two, I have had wonderful comments and emails about posts, sometimes months or years later and that brings me on to categories and tags
Some bloggers miss a huge trick by not realising the power and purpose of categories and tags. They are your SEO information like the key words when launching on KDP. It is through them that folks can track you down on the internet and read your post, even though they do not blog themselves.
Categories
These are your umbrella subjects. There will be a list for you under post, or you can write new ones and build a list. At first I had far too many and had to rationalise. They can be your tabs, but if you write a category, for example ‘Early Flight’ or Book Reviews’ as in my list and a reader clicks on one of those phrases by the side of your post, all your posts under that subject will come up together. (and don’t forget to unclick the ‘uncategorized’!)
Tags
With these words folks can find your post on the internet when they search for specific things. It may come up when you google it. In my early days of writing if, for example, you googled my twitter handle @Riduna, it might come up with my Twitter feed but also any pages which might mention my first book names Riduna on my blog or of course Amazon. Of course, I have not promoted Riduna for a good while (and probably should do) but you get the idea I hope.
I admit, due to recent circumstances I’ve let some of this slide a bit but reflecting on this has been really positive and given me a gentle nudge too!
Happy blogging. Much love Diana
Diana Jackson 