It is useful to compare blog tours with conventional book tours.  A typical book might take an author to a number of cities where he or she will make presentations, do book readings, participate in book signings and conduct interviews with the local media. Setting up and managing a book tour requires a great amount of planning, scheduling and coordination with involvement by publisher staff, the author, local media, event planners in the local venues and so on. There can also be considerable expense involved to cover travel, lodging and the local venues where an author might present. Who bears this cost depends on the agreement between publisher and author.

Blog touring, on the other hand, is much less time and cost intensive. The tasks associated with a blog tour can easily be handled by the author and the rewards, in terms of audience exposure and book sales can be much greater. The table below contrasts book touring and blog touring.

In upcoming posts, we’ll discuss how to set up a blog tour and also talk with book marketers who specialize in setting up and managing book tours for authors.

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• Get an RSS feed reader and point it to sites that talk about things in your topic domain. This often provides great ideas for a blog post. With the RSS reader you avoid the site surfing – the posts comes to you.
• Interview people pertinent to your topic. I have found that people are very willing to do interviews for a blog. Send them 8-10 questions via e-mail. When they send back their responses, the post is practically written for you.
• Invite people to be guest bloggers; perhaps writing one post per month.
•  Try writing reviews of books that relate to your subject area. These are generally easier to write than other types of posts.
• Do a Links of the Day type of post. This is basically a list of 4-5 sites that you find really interesting and think your readers might, too. You can write a one sentence annotation of each link to give them an idea of what they will find when they click on it.
• Do a “5 things . . .” type of post. This is a post that has a title like “5 Things You Should Always Do when [fill in the blank].” It is just a simple bulleted list. People tend to like these becasuse they are useful and easy to read.
• Go to YouTube and add a video that highlights what you are talking about. The maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words definitely applies in blogging.
• If you blog about things that are topical or in the news, set up a Google alert based on a useful you did about that topic. Then Google will automatically rerun the search and e-mail you the results based on a frequency you specify. You can get multiple posts by continuing to update a story with the new information you get from the alerts.
• Monitor your topic or story on Twitter. You will often find new twists to a story, people you can interview or links to sites that provide great information you can incorporate into your posts.

Using a variety of blog post types also makes your blog more interesting for readers.

Research – Blogs can be a great tool for researching your book.  This can work in a couple of different ways.  Your own blog can be used to solicit and collect research information.  Or, you can use an RSS reader to track blogs which are discussing topics pertinent to your book.

Findability – Blogs tend to do well in search engines because of the frequency of update, copious tagging through the blog software itself as well as the greater number of inbound and outbound links.  These and other factors will usually help ensure your blog posts move  up more rapidly in search results.

Writing discipline – Blogs can help build writing discipline.  Many writers struggle with getting into the practice of writing every day, or some regular schedule.  With blogs, you can see the readership start to build; generally, the more often you blogs, the faster the audience will build.  This can be a great stimulus to writing every day. 

Audience building- Blogs are wonderful audience building machines.  First, they are more findable (see item above).  Secondd, when others link to your blog or its posts, those links act like traffic annuities, continually bringing more visitors to your site.  You can amplify your blog’s audience building potential through RSS subscriptions, bookmarking sites and social networks like Facebook.

Measurability- Most blogging software now comes with a set of basic metrics built in – e.g. number of visitors and pageviews.  But through the use of tools like Google Analytics or other online measurement services, you can track an amazing amount of information about visitor behavior and engagement – e.g. where visitors are located, what sites referred them, how long they stay on your site, what they read or download, and so on.  This information can be used with an agent or a publisher to demonstrate who the audience is for your content and what content they like best.  Referencing this data can make your book pitch much more successful.  If you are self-publishing it provides valuable insights into your potential market.

Content selection – Examining the metrics you’ve collected for individual blog posts can tell you which content is the most popular with your readership.  It becomes a straightforward matter to weed out content that doesn’t draw an audience and include more content that does.

Marketing- Finally, blogs make a great marketing platform.  You can have your blog do double duty as a book marketing site – including things like: speaking events, appearances, reviews, testimonials and links to sites where the book may be purchased.  Many authors also now do blog tours.  These are similar to book tours, except that instead of going to cities and speaking , they visit blogs focusing on topics related to their book.  The author provides an interview or the blog owner agrees to review the author’s book.

In essence, blogs can help you build an audience for your work while you write and then market your title back to that same audience.

I  would love to hear your feedback and hope you will find what you need here to make your own blog to book dreams come true!