Why Blogging Won't Sell Your Books

Blog vs Website for Draft Manuscript

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.

Excerpt from Internet Book Marketing:

Me: "My name is Morris and I'm a blogger."

Everybody at the BA meeting "Hi Morris!"

Me: "I can't do this..." Sobs and runs out of the room.

Blogging is an addiction. Blogging is a bad addiction for most authors. There are exceptions to the rule, highly disciplined authors who relegate their blog to the once a month update about the progress of their latest book, but most of us fall into the colossal waste of time category as bloggers. While I'm going to offer a more technical argument as to why blogs make bad platforms for authors, particularly standalone blogs that aren't nested in a static, traditional website, I want to make the emotional argument first. Blogging sucked three years of creative writing out of my brain during which I didn't publish a single book, and it can do it to you as well. Blogs lead authors into repeating themselves over and over again on the same subject and into spending time and money researching topics for new blog posts. Blogs take on a life of their own and drag the blogger into an endless attempt to maintain and amuse a subscriber base, preaching to the converted, and waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down a germ of an idea for the next mandatory post. Most bloggers lead lives of quiet desperation, quiet because nobody reads their blogs and desperation because they don't know how to stop. If I could sum up the problem with blogs in one 90's concept, it would be the lack of closure. Blogging never reaches a logical conclusion, it just goes on and on until the blogger breaks the vicious cycle and walks away or finds a sort of peace six feet under. If Dante was writing today, one of the punishments of the damned would surely be perpetually spending the night in Hell writing blogs, and the day reading them.

But sticking strictly with the colossal waste of time aspect, let me give you some statistics from my own blogging career. I've been writing the Self Publishing blog since the summer of 2005, with over 450 posts at the time of this writing, and a top 10 ranking on Google for the phrase "Self Publishing." Sound impressive? There's a single static page on my website that draws more unique visitors every day than all of my blog posts combined. Only the main page of the blog appears in Top 50 pages ranked for popularity on my site each day, only a handful of posts in the archives draw more than a ten visitors a day. The average number of visitors to archived blog posts on my site is less than 2 unique visitors a day, compared to an average over 30 visitors a day for static pages.The oldest posts draw much better than the newest posts, because they were more likely to get deep links early on, based on people finding them through search engines. As the number of posts expands and the subjects begin to overlap, the search engines are more likely to send visitors to the older, more "authoritative" posts, which only reinforces the problem. If I'd quit blogging at the end of 2005 (and I really did try), I'd still get half the visitors I get today, for about a twentieth of the work Most importantly, I went three years without writing a new book as the blog served as the main release valve for my pent up pontificating. At the time of this writing, my blog about Self Publishing already contains twice as many words as all of my self published books combined!

The main reason that the viability of archived blog posts follow the law of diminishing returns is the repetition and overlap. When you're creating static web pages, essentially draft chapters of books manuscripts or stand-alone essays and articles, you wouldn't repeat the same themes over and over again, unless you are sorely lacking in originality. So your blog eventually saturates all the search engine presence you're going to achieve on a given subject unless the subject itself is undergoing rapid and ongoing change, especially in terms of the proper names involved. I've also got fiction stories worked into my blog, chunks of memoir, anecdotes from travels and a lot of cleaned up correspondence, all of it connected in some way with self publishing. My readers seem to enjoy it, but it presents a tricky categorization job for the search engines, and all of the personal observations that creep in are no doubt a turn-off to some readers who would have been happy just to get the facts. Many blogs are also hurt by the organization of the content, and a different method of archiving blog posts using different blogging software might help on the margins.

Another reason for the relative lack of visitors to archived posts is that the titles of blog posts are usually repeated in several crucial places, which reinforces to the search engine that this is precisely what author believes that post to be about. So an art historian who wrote an amusing blog post titled "The Fly On Michelangelo's David" will probably garner a top ranking in Google for people who search on "Fly On Michelangelo's David", but not much else, unless the archived post attracts a number of deep links from sites that view it in a larger context. Unfortunately, people who link to blogs are more likely to link to the main page "Here's a great blog" than to the individual posts that hooked their interest. Since around zero people a year are likely to run a search on "Fly On Michelangelo's David", the title carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, even if it got a great reaction when it was the feature post on the main page. Although the post may offer a brilliant analysis of some facet of Renaissance sculpture, the author has unconsciously convinced the search engines that it's about that funny first sentence where a fly gets by museum security and lands on David's nose.

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.