My fabulous webmistress, Linda Lee, asked me to write a post for her website, Smart Women Stupid Computers, on what I’ve learned about building a platform and/or marketing your book online.   While I’m learning more every day, I wanted to share what I’ve found so far.  If any of you have any other tips or tools, please feel free to comment.  We’re all in this together.

Once you have a website (that preferably includes a blog), update often. Search engines like sites that have a lot of fresh content.  This will really help you with ranking in major search engines like Google.  If you have a blog, you should plan to update it twice weekly at least.  Schedule specific days, like Tuesday and Saturday, so you won’t forget. Make sure that your content is easy to share.  If you don’t have sharing widgets on your site (Upload to Facebook, Tweet This!, Digg, Delicious, etc.) then get your designer to add them to the site asap.  Lastly, be sure to track your statistics. A good site stat service is Google Analytics, pretty comprehensive and fairly easy to integrate into your site. You should know your traffic patterns and learn to read these reports (it’s a lot easier than it sounds). This way you’ll know what your site is doing and what it isn’t.

More about websites next time…

Once you have a blog, the next step is to have a website.  Ideally, the two should be combined.  WordPress.org allows you to do that.  One mistake often made is to have way to much information on your site.  Your website isn’t a magazine, people don’t read, they scan. Make sure your site isn’t so crammed with text that it’s not scannable. Ideally your home page should have no more than 200 to 250 words. Also, make sure you have a clear call to action. You want your visitors to do something on your site, yes? Make sure they know what that is, clearly and precisely.

When I mentioned that writers can have a free blog on WordPress, I meant WordPress.com. not WordPress.org.  Although both use the same blogging software, at WordPress.com the hosting is done by them, whereas at WordPress.org, you need to install the software on your server  or with a third party provider.  As for tools to help drive traffic to your site (assuming first that you have interesting content) be sure to fill in your “tags” on posts.  Tags are crucial because these are what show up most often when people do a search.  Submit your website and/or blog to Google, MSN and Yahoo.  Also, set up an account with each of the top six social bookmarking sites: Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  Then submit your site, posts and/or articles.  I could go on, but that’s enough for now.  More later…

Even if you haven’t finished your book, blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your completed book to that same audience.

The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years.  There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, a popular blog search engine.  According to demographics collected by the Pew Internet Study, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area.

You can use blogs to develop an audience for your work, promote your book, communicate directly with your readers, help develop your writing skills and provide an opportunity to obtain feedback on book ideas, and offer contests and other incentives to purchase books.

Several services provide free blog space and templates including Blogger and WordPress.  By following the simple instructions, an author can have a personalized blog set up and running in less than an hour.

So start blogging!