by Jo | Jun 1, 2012 | Author Blog Challenge, BLOG |
I’m not an author, but I really wanted to take part in another blog challenge and be able to promote authors at the same time. This is why I have decided that I will post author interviews on my blog over the 28 day author blog challenge.
I have already sent out invites to my Goodreads friends and also to my eBook formatting clients in the hope they will answer some questions about their writing and I will be able to provide my blog readers with some great new authors to check out. Most of the authors I know through social media are self-published authors, so this extra exposure, which be great for them, I really hope you’ll enjoy reading the interviews.
I have had a lot of emails requesting the set of questions already, so if you’re an author and you’d like to take part in the interview series then please get in touch as soon as possible as I think I may end up with more interviews than days in the blog challenge.
If you’d like to take part in the author blog challenge, it starts on 2 June (tomorrow) and will run through to the 29 June. You’ll need to register at the website and check out the rules. You can also follow the challenge on Twitter, the official Twitter handle is @authorblogchal
On a side note, I will still continue with my normal blogging schedule alongside these interviews for those of you who follow my other articles. I will be separating out the challenge blog posts by using a new category, Author Blog Challenge so they are easy to find, all other posts will show on the front page of my blog as usual.
by Jo | May 2, 2012 | #blogboost, BLOG, Tips |
As some of you may know I took part in the Ultimate Blog Challenge back in January. It was a great success, not only did it give me the motivation to blog more often but it also increased my blog traffic by more than double.
I recently heard about another blog challenge, the 28 Day Blog Challenge for Authors which I have promoted on all my social networks. I work with a lot of authors, eBook formatting and more recently helping them with their websites and social media presence – so this blog challenge is something I feel would be a great benefit to all authors who want to attract some new followers for their work.
While discussing the challenge on a Facebook group (SelfPubEbooks) someone asked me whether I had blogged about the results of the challenge I took part in earlier this year. The answer was no, I hadn’t… so just slightly belated (only 4 months late), this is my blog challenge results post!!
I think the best way of showing the results is with an image of my stats, taken directly from Google Analytics.
As you can see from this screenshot taken from my analytics account my traffic increased quite a bit. I published my website on 8 November 2011 and as you can see my traffic was pretty much non-existent. The blog challenge started on 1 January 2012 and the traffic pretty much appeared that day. Of course it wasn’t a case of writing a post and then waiting for people to appear – you have to be focussed on sharing your content. The thing about the blog challenges is that you have an audience waiting in the wings and ready to jump on your blog to comment and interact with you.
Some of the things you need to do to ensure you make the most of a blog challenge are:
- Write interesting and unique content.
- Share on all your social media networks, that means Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc… StumbleUpon is a great way of attracting traffic (I unfortunately hadn’t realised this at the time of the challenge, but now use it a lot)
- Reply to any comments on your blog posts in a timely manner and interact with people who take the time to comment.
- Visit and comment on other blogs in the challenge.
- Make sure you have an RSS feed available so people will receive your posts automatically – I received a lot of traffic through my FeedBurner feed.
It’s hard work being part of a blog challenge, to come up with a different post each day and then to share it as much as possible. A good thing about the challenge I took part in is it runs 4 times per year, it most recently ran in April but I just didn’t have the time to take part.
Even though I gained a lot more traffic through doing the challenge I didn’t gain any new clients directly – but I did learn all the skills I needed to attract new clients in the long run. I now get a lot of work through social media, mainly Twitter and I feel that if I hadn’t taken part in the challenge I wouldn’t have learnt the skills so quickly, that I have now.
So if you’re an author and want to get your work out there, I strongly advise you to take part in this blog challenge, it starts on 2 June and I will be following everyone who is taking part. Just remember the points I have made above, if you follow these tips the traffic to your blog will increase as mine did – and I guarantee you’ll get more sales by the end of the challenge too!
I would be happy to share more statistics with you, if you want to know something specific please comment below and I will get back to you.
Check out all the blog posts I wrote in the 31 Day Ultimate Blog Challenge!
