Expert Guest Blog Posting By D’vorah Lansky, M.Ed., Authors of Book Marketing Made Easy: Simple Strategies for Selling Your Nonfiction Book Online
Blogging as an integral part of your online book marketing strategy. Your blog is the hub of your online empire. Create an attractive, interactive environment where people will want to visit often.  Creating a blog and writing a few posts every week isn’t going to help you sell more books unless you also work at promoting your blog.
Online blog marketing opportunities abound, and most of them are free. Make use of every chance you get to find new followers and get links back to your blog posts.
Here are some easy ways to promote your blog:

• Begin using social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Automate announcements of new blog posts by using the “Twitter Tools” plugin on your blog and the “Networked Blogs” application on Facebook. This will automatically submit new blog posts to such sites every time you post. Doing so is an important way to gain new readers and subscribers.
• Use every post to invite readers to subscribe or follow. Add a footer to your posts that says something to the effect of, “Enjoy this article? Receive email alerts when new articles are available! Just click on the follow button or subscribe above.”
• Seek out guest bloggers to post to your blog, and when you use one of their posts, ask that guest blogger to help promote it by tweeting to his followers and posting a link on his blog. This approach gives your audience exposure to a wider range of topics and lines of thought. It also induces reciprocity, as other bloggers will likely want to have you become a guest blogger.
• Become a guest blogger. Offer other bloggers high-quality articles in exchange for a link from their site to your site. Add a line below your email signature with a link back to your blog. Every time someone reads one of your email messages, you’ll be advertising your blog.
• Use quality search engine optimization (SEO) strategies in your blog description and in every post you write. Use your keywords in the title and throughout your post. This way, you will get better search engine results when people search for the topic(s) you write about.
• Post comments on other blogs. You will have the opportunity to provide a link back to your blog when you fill out the requested information in the “comments” box. This commenting strategy works especially well on blogs that are frequented by your target audience and the professionals who serve them. You will quickly become known as an authority on your topic.
• Respond to comments! Authors who respond to comments generally get a lot more comments than those who ignore their readers.
• Use social media to promote your blog posts. Announce your new posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites.

The more ways you can find to promote your blog online, the more visitors, readers, subscribers, and followers you’ll get. That means the more people you’ll reach with your message and the more people you’ll be able to introduce to your book.
D’vorah Lansky, M.Ed. and Marketing Wizard has been marketing online since 1994. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller, Book Marketing Made Easy: Simple Strategies for Selling Your Nonfiction Book Online. Visit her blog at: www.BookMarketingMadeEasy.com Get your free guide to Guest Blogging and check out D’vorah’s upcoming course on Virtual Book Tours for Authors at http://VirtualBookToursMadeEasy.com