While blog touring is not exactly a new way of marketing, it is still new to some authors and bloggers. I thought I’d address a list of questions I’ve gotten about blog tours from newbie authors and bloggers.
What is a blog tour?
A blog tour is the quickest way to get your book or product in front of a larger audience. For the sake of the book reading audience, lets refer to products as books, from a marketing perspective, books are products, from and author’s perspective their books are their babies. What happens on a blog tour is your book gets promoted on different blogs within a certain time frame. Each blog has a different audience and if you are featured on that blog, your book is exposed to that audience.
What are the benefits for the blogger?
Bloggers, especially avid bloggers are always on the look out for new content. Researching and creating content takes a lot of work and time. For a blogger participating in a blog tour, content is provided. Blog tours also tend to drive a lot of traffic to a blog. For instance, an author may have a large following, if their book is featured on your site their followers may follow and even promote the post for you. You may gain a new reader or two because new people are discovering your blog. That’s just two reasons but there are many others.
What content will be provided?
The type of content provided depends on the author, tour company and blogger preference. The most important information that will always be provided is the media kit. The media kit consists of book covers, synopsis, author contact links, author biography, purchase links for the book and any links to giveaways or contests.
Some tours give you to opportunity to interview the author or receive a guest post from the author. The benefits of hosting a guest post as a blogger means that you will get a fresh voice on your site. As an author, offering a guest post shows off your writing style and introduces your voice to a new group of readers.
How do I get started?
Authors can do a search for tour companies, there are tons out there that specialize in different genres or sign up here to book your tour with Plain Talk Book Marketing.
Bloggers interested in hosting with us can sign up here.
These are just some of the benefits of blog tours, the benefits are too much to list here so I’ve compiled them in my book Blog Tours: A Win-Win for Authors & Bloggers. Also contained in the book, a step-by step guide on putting together your own blog tour.
See you on the road!
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