What Sucks? The Blog or The Blogger?

How successful are you at blogging? Feeling good about it? Sort of? Not so much?

If you feel ambivalent, you are not alone. Blogging has become the necessary evil. It is often viewed as a burden foisted on innocent writers by that dark force of the publishing industry -- the marketing department.

Blogging seems unavoidable. It is the axis upon which all other marketing strategies revolve. Got a radio interview? Make sure you tell those listeners your blog address. That newspaper article needs a link too. Literature for conferences must contain your domain. The list goes on.

That pressure to provide a link causes many writers to scramble haphazardly into building their blog presence. Often they do so without training or guidance. Soon their unfocused blog posts run the gamut of topics, seemingly based on the principle that posting anything is better than nothing. Blog! The readers will come. When no readers arrive, they have no idea why. Even worse, the visitors they do get leave without buying a book or even commenting on a post. What went wrong?

Where is the blog-love we’ve heard so much about? Where are the fans? The comments? The book sales?

Why didn't anyone mention all the work that’s involved? The extra writing takes you away from your manuscript. The blog promotion is overwhelming. Social Media. Keeping up with comments and email. Checking links. Organizing the site. Archiving. Tags. Meta tags. SEO. Lists of internet acronyms that you don’t even want to understand.

Is any of this really selling books?

All of it begs the question -- is the problem the tool, or the skill of the ones who wield it? Is the era of the blog over, the market saturated? Or maybe it’s that people are tired of authors who’s blogs offer nothing more creative than a running commentary on what they had for breakfast (Don’t laugh, I’ve read it).

Frustrated yet?

If so, join us each Wednesday of this month while I explore the pitfalls and successes of the blogging imperative. I’ll give you the unfiltered truth about why the blog platform really does suck and what you can do about it. Then I’ll reverse course, turning the spotlight on the blogger. You’ll see where nearly every writer (myself included) has gone wrong in their blogging. Then we'll both learn from those mistakes and master the number one rule of blogging -- readers, readers, readers.

So get ready for a journey into the foggy world of blogs. Let’s see if we can clear the air.

Dec 8th: Why Blogs Are Bad to the Bone.

Dec 15th: Bloggers Gone Wild

Dec 22nd: Blogs That Have Seen The Light

Dec 29th: The Number One Rule of Blogging

Posted by Tamela Buhrke