Blog Events

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One thing you might consider to give people a big reason to come to your blog is to host an event.

Events are different than normal blogging in that they have a definite start and a definite end date.  However, just like normal blogging, they are limited only by your imagination and your technical ability.

I have participated in several blog events that have been successful in getting the word out.  Some of them have been:

#1  A Special Month dedicated to a topic.  One blogger I know had a month dedicated to men who write Christian novels.  (That wasn’t the one I did.   Others have featured a Hero’s Month where all month-long, they had blogs about heroes from different books they had either read or that authors posted about to the blog.  You could do all kinds of these “months”–Pet Month where you feature pets from books, Heroine Month, Christian Authors month, etc.

#2 An event centered around a holiday or time of year.  My friend Penny Zeller hosted “Favorite Christmas Memories” on her blog last year for the first 12 days of December.  She had 2 authors per day sharing their favorite memories.  Then each author gave away one copy of their book to someone who had commented.  Because there were a lot of authors in the project, Penny got a lot of exposure for her blog with others tweeting about their posts on the blog.  These events are great fun, but they are work to set up, run, and follow up on.  So plan carefully.

#3  The third type of event is actually how G&F started.  Karen Baney was a part of a group of 36 authors through the World Literacy Cafe who all got together to celebrate the launch of WLC-founder Melissa Foster’s book.  For 3 weeks before, all the authors tweeted about the event, posted blogs about their stuff that linked to the page of the event, blogged about the event, etc.  Then for three days, all of the books including the launch book were 99-Cents and they gave away a book if you bought 3 or more.  It was a huge event that launched Melissa into the stratosphere of the ebook world.  However, do not think it was an easy promotion.  We did one with 10 authors for Karen’s book in December, and it was very successful.  It was also A LOT of work to keep up with who’s blogging where, what links should you send people to, getting the page set up, tracking sales, tracking ranks…. It was a challenge.

I did a smaller one of these earlier in December, and it was quite successful as well.  In that one, the lead author hosted all of us on her blog and we all pointed our links toward her blog which had tons of info about the book sale.  These do take a lot of forward planning, and I can imagine that it’s possible to do all that work and not sell a lot of books.  For me, they were great jumping off places.

#4… For next time… Blog Hops!