BookLocker Online Marketing

What blog site would you recommend. I currently have a blog on Bloglines.com

Thanks in advance!
Kevin Kingston

I’m not that familiar with Blogline’s service, to be honest.

There are really two types of blogging systems – software you host yourself on your web server and services that host the blog for you.

Software You Host

At BookLocker, we use WordPress to manage all our blogs. This is software you install on your own server. The default installation only allows you to create one blog. We’ve modified our version to allow for the creation of multiple blogs so we can offer these to our authors at no cost.

We also create our blogs under BookLocker subdomains. For example, this blog is under the URL: http://marketing.booklocker.com/. We could have put it under the URL http://www.booklocker.com/marketing. (In fact, it was under that URL for a while.) But it has been our experience that search engines more easily index subdomains. So Bloglines is probably not doing you any favors hosting your blog under its main URL.

Here are some of the more active BookLocker author blogs:

http://travel.booklocker.com/
http://exploringseventies.booklocker.com/
http://appalachian.booklocker.com/

Prior to WordPress, we used a piece of software called MovableType. It is a fabulous piece of software. In fact, our oldest and most popular author blog is still on it (we haven’t transitioned it to the new system yet). But MovableType made a change in the way they charge for the software – it is now per author – so the licensing for us was cost prohibitive given that we wanted to offer blogs to all our authors.

Hosted Blogging Services

Services that host the blog for you are what most people use. I usually recommend two options:

1.) TypePad – this is the hosted version MovableType, the software I discussed above. It costs money, but it is probably the best service out there. You should spring for the Pro version ($149.50 per year) because it offers the most flexibility.

2.) Blogger – this is a free service. Google owns it now. The trade-off for getting a blog for free is that Google runs ads on your blog. You can pay to have the ads removed. But if you are going to pay, I’d recommend just going with TypePad. It has more features for the money.

UPDATE: Jan Price writes: ” I am just reading your newletter and notice in the marketing blog your husband is hosting has some misinformation included. I use blogger and it does NOT run ads on my blogs. There is an option to add adsense or something but I haven’t yet run across any sites using it, thankfully.” – Thanks, Jan. Blogger did run ads on the free version at one time, but Google must have changed that policy.

A new hosted service to come on the scene is WordPress.com – a hosted version of the software we use. I’ve never played with it, but I imagine it works exactly like our version. It is free, so you might want to check it out as an option instead of Blogger.

Regarding your question about “subscribing”, what you are referring to is subscribing to the RSS feed of the blog. I’ve described RSS Feeds before, but an RSS feed is essentially a special URL that contains a list of the most recent posts on your blog. By monitoring that file with special software or through special web sites, a person can see when you add new content to your blog without having to visit it every day.

I read a study recently that only 12% of the Internet population uses RSS. That isn’t surprising because, as you touch on in your question, accessing RSS feeds requires jumping over a few technical hurdles.

First off, you need some sort of feed reader (also known as a feed aggregator) – that is the software or service that monitors RSS feeds and notifies you when sites get updated.

Here are comprehensive lists of feed readers for Windows and Mac. Some are free, but many cost money.

Bloglines, the service you are using to manage your blog, also doubles as a web-based feed reading service.

There is talk that the new version of Internet Explorer will have feed reading built in. Mac users already have this with their browser – Safari. And if you are a FireFox user, the feature is known as Live Bookmarks.

Anyway, for the average user it is pretty confusing. Which is probably why only 12% use RSS feeds.

I’ve recently found a service that basically emails you when a blog is updated. Blog owners can offer this to their readers. I have it on this blog (you can see the blank on the right under the heading “Enter Email Address:”. It is called FeedBlitz . The basic service is free. You can subscribe to the pay service to customize the emails that are sent out.

If you decide to add FeedBlitz to your blog, you can add it via the FeedBurner service. FeedBurner allows you to monitor who subscribes to your RSS feed, as well as add all sorts of neat features to enhance it.

So if it is between a blog or a website, which do you recommend if you are selling your book on it? Can a blog have pay pal associated with it for instance? Also, what are the advantages of a blog over an e-zine?

Willow

Blogs, web sites, and ezines are all really just variations of Internet publishing. They all use text and HTML code to do their things. So there is a lot of cross-over in functionality. But you need some idea of what you want to accomplish before you decide which one to do because one format may be better than another.

I personally push blogs to authors because most authors are not experienced in the technical side of the Internet. And blogs hide a lot of that technology from them while still giving them the benefits of a web site. But a blog is designed to be a format where you crank out short, pithy commentary on a regular basis. If you can’t sustain that, then a blog will do you no good.

A straight web site, on the other hand, is typically the opposite of a blog – lots of static, unchanging pages. Now that might be fine if your purpose is to sell a product, where the information on the page never really changes over time. But if you are trying to build an audience, that is not a good way to go. You want changing content. You aren’t going to get repeat readers if you don’t give them new stuff to read on a regular basis. The blog format just makes it easier to create new stuff.

An ezine typically means an electronic magazine or newsletter. It has columns and features and formally written articles. This is obviously designed to build readership because by definition the content is always changing. But again, it is a complicated endevor for an author. Blogs can acheive a similar effect for less effort.

See, I think this is where unknown authors get confused. The major purpose of their web sites should be to build readership, not sell books. Selling books is really an after-effect of building readership. If you have an audience, then everything else will follow.

To answer your specific PayPal question – yes, certainly you can add PayPal or some sort of shopping cart system to your blog.