“Blogging doesn’t work for fiction writers!”
I’ve heard this statement so many times. They say that fiction writers can’t gain new readers the way other bloggers do because no one is searching for what they have to offer. While I agree that someone might not be searching for your newest book “Dusted Earth”, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t massive potential for you to grab new interested readers!
I have seen people create large audiences from the smallest niches imaginable, and I want to show you how you can use the very same techniques used by major companies to increase the quantity of traffic from their ideal customers.
Let’s start by thinking about how other products and blogs address this problem and then strategize their content. We’re going to use the example of a company that only sells dental floss and has already written about every subject they could think of when it comes to dental floss. Do they just quit writing content and trying to grab new readers? On the contrary, they come up with ways to bring in even greater traffic by writing about things that their perfect customer also cares about. They focus on a Market Segment which is defined as “A group of buyers within a market who have similar wants and needs.” So for a dental floss company, they can, with a great degree of accuracy, find out that their customers also buy:
- toothpaste
- toothbrushes
- mouthwash
So instead of lamenting over the fact that there is nothing to write about relating to dental floss, they find terms that their ideal customers are also searching for. Using a keyword research tool, they could easily find out that people are searching these terms each month:
- how often should you change your toothbrush (2,400 searches per month)
- mouthwash for sensitive teeth (1,000 searches per month)
- toothpaste for gingivitis (1,800 searches per month)
You can tell from the way these words are searched that they would be a perfect fit for our dental floss. So this company would write articles on these subjects and then include their product at the end of the article as well.
So that is how a dental floss company would handle the issue of people not searching for their product. So how do we do this as fiction authors?
Using the same logic from our example, we would think about things that our perfect customer would also be interested in. Many times this will be other books or movies that are similar. So let’s search Google for “popular science fiction books” and pick three.
So for our book “Dusted Earth,” similar famous books might be:
- Fahrenheit 451
- Ender’s Game
- Ready Player One
Using the same techniques, we could use a research tool to quickly find out that these terms are frequently searched:
- Fahrenheit 451 quotes (7,200 searches per month)
- Books like Ready Player One (4,100 searches per month)
- Ender’s Game characters (1,200 searches per month)
Now that is only three terms out of endless options and that represents a lot of potential readers! So writing valuable content like this for other things your audience is interested in is the best way in the world to introduce yourself to a likeminded audience. Once you write this content, there are tons of ways you can turn these readers into fans of yours from simply mentioning your book at the end of the article, or offering a sample of one of your books in exchange for their email address.
I’m not crazy; this actually works! I have helped many site owners grow their blogs to a million readers by using techniques just like this. If you want to exponentially grow your readership, then check out my newest product, the Author Blog Machine. It will help you do exactly this, and we are selling it at a steep discount this week only.
