Blogs and Best Sellers

Besides being an essential part of a good, convergence-based marketing strategy, blogs have become a launch pad of sorts for good writers to take their craft to the next level. While it used to take submitting manuscripts to publisher after publisher to get a book deal, now all it takes is somebody from a publishing house stumbling across your blog. Take, for example, one of my personal daily favorites: Stuff White People Like, who in less than seven months, managed to turn a blog celebrating the banality of whiteness into a $350,000 book offer from Random House.

Needless to say, not every blog out there is worth a publishing deal. Truly, blogs like Stuff White People Like, Earl Boykins (who just turned his blog into a weekly graphic in the Sunday NY Times Arts section) and Indexed  have a combination of hilarious and provocative content, as well as simple and nice design. It’s not just fun and games either, the modern design-minded and crafty folks at Apartment Therapy  turned their home-focused blog into a major book deal with Chronicle Books a couple of months ago.

I’m not saying every blog should be turned into a New York Times best seller, but there are some things bloggers can do to improve their readership, and maybe impress a bored publishing clerk who’s surfing the web on company time. We recommend these steps first:

1.    Keep your content regular and readable
2.    Try to get people to subscribe to your blog, through readers, rss or emails
3.    Authentic Inbound links, whether through bloggers quoting you leaving comments on others’ blogs with links back to your blog.
4.    Publish your blog on your facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Ning sites
5.    Incorporate analytics on your site to track where readers are coming from.

Note, these are standard, by-the-book approaches, but they work. Try them out on your blog and see how close you are to a best seller…

-Ben