This is a presentation I gave for the Writerly conference in Seattle. These tips are primarily focused on WordPress users, but most of the advice can be applied to blogging more generally. Writerly is a writers community, so this presentation is focused on blogging for book marketing. Much of this advice is stuff I wish my clients knew.

1. Getting Started with Author Blogging
Building Your Author Platform
karmabennett.com
@daretoeatapeach

2. Getting to Know You
How many of you have a website?
How many of your have a blog?
How many of you blog at least once a month?
How many of you think having a blog is important to help
your book succeed?

3. Business card vs journal
Search engines like blogs
updated often
more content
Readers like blogs too...for the same reason
Benefit of Blog

4. Tidbits
Your interests that vaguely relate to your books
The writer’s life
Process
Research!
Inspiration
Your promotions and events
Your keywords
What to Write About

5. Should you name the site after your book? Your name?
Know your keywords
high search volume
low competition
.com is mostly important for in-person referrals
But you do want your own domain
Picking a URL

6. Intimidated by blogging? Mini-blog on social media
Tumblr is good for fashion, photos, pop culture, teens, short posts
Wix: beware any blog you can’t export
Blogspot: not pretty, but strong community and linked to Google
Wordpress.com
Wordpress.org
How many of you are Wordpress users?
The next tip is for any blog host. No matter what you site you use you should...
Where to Blog?

7. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Bite-sized nuggets are less intimidating
You write the same amount but you have more posts
Inter-related posts
More to promote
Note that this is good for both search engines and readers. An important
balance to respect.
Write Short Posts

8. When you have longer posts, or whenever it
makes sense to do so, break up your text
into sections
Think as though you’re writing an outline,
but write as though you’re writing a
journal entry
Use section headers
Helps the visually-impaired
Good for SEO
Smart for changing future designs
Break Up Your Text

9. Categories are your TOC
Tags are your index
Yay, Taxonomies!
● Navigation: it’s not just for libraries. OK, or ships
○ Search engines use it
○ Readers use it
○ Plugins use it
● You can create additional pages for navigation when you have more posts
● Here’s how you add tags in Wordpress
● Here’s where you create/alter categories

10. An image with every post
Embed your video
Stock houses
Your friendly blogger: always attribute!
Creative commons images still attribute!
and let the author know
Your own photos: still attribute!
Media Matters

11. Free
Very easy to use
Batch rename photos to match keywords
Add watermark
resize and crop photos
filters
Picasa

12. Make lists
Use Page Breaks
More Formatting Tips
Paste Text Without Formatting
Add a teaser

13. Wordpress Plugins
Easier Than Overeating on Thanksgiving!

14. What Are Plugins?
Plugins are customizations. Most of them are free.
If someone else has taken the time to code a customization for your site, why
not take advantage of that?
There are more Wordpress plugins than you can imagine...

15. CommentLuv
A sharing plugin (Shareaholic is good)
NRelate Most Popular
NRelate Related Posts
Post Ender
Tweet Old Posts
Plugins for Marketing

16. Akismet---So important!
Autopost Thumbnail
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Wordpress Database Backup
Relevanssi
Google XML Sitemaps
An SEO plugin (SEO by Yoast is good)
Plugins for Everyone
See something cool on another blog?
Search for a plugin that does the same thing!
Got a plugin you love? Tell me!

17. 1.Choose Plugins from your dashboard
sidebar
2.Search for the plugin you want
3.Choose the plugin you want
4.Click: Install now
5.Type in your FTP login info
(Important: NOT Wordpress login!)
6.Click: Activate Plugin
How to Install Plugins

18. Questions?
@daretoeatapeach
karmabennett.com
karma@futureisfiction.com
???