Author Startups – Open Book Blog Hop #101

♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦

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Topic #101

How’d You Start Your Business, Blog, Or Freelance Career?

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Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

The start up of my blog is inextricable from the publishing of my first book. The original Blue Honor site was my maiden voyage into marketing, as well. Not having a network around me, I had a hard start. People would somehow find me, but in dribs and drabs. When I attended book events, they would ask for the site, and I had no way to check the days after for hits. The only too available was a quirky counter that didn’t always work.

My skills with graphics were also very limited, and I didn’t have access to the sites I do now to help me build great content. The year was 2008, just before the spring of 2009 when the book was set to arrive. In 2005, I had joined deviantArt and learned quite a bit about digital graphics and design, but I was not formally trained. I’m grateful for my time there, however, because I learned important skills that have been priceless to marketing my books.

What you see on this current site was born out of the site I had created back then. The only thing I didn’t have was an official blog. If there was something that I wanted to write in length, I would post a note on Facebook. Otherwise, I didn’t blog. My focus was on my professional careers and learning more about what I should be doing. I really dug in my heals against blogging. The reasoning behind that feeling was a fear of getting buried in the constant posting and responsibility of a blog. With a job to pay the bills, my time was limited to begin with. The refurbishment of my site, however, demanded better and consistently new content. Putting the blog off wasn’t an option any longer. This was a major key to marketing that I was missing, a means of outreach and connection with the readership I was building. Without this, my site would go largely ignored, as it had to that point. Branching out beyond local book signings was a must, and a blog allows me to do that.

The concern about time is still always on my mind, even more so as I become a mother. The difference now, though, is that I view this time as professional development, spending time honing my skills and learning new ones, then employing all I learn from my network. Facebook still play an important role, as does all the social media I take part in, because that gives me a platform to share my work outside my site, and bring attention to it.

Considering the topics I wanted to write on was an important step in the refurbishing of the site. Would I want them to correspond to my books, and in what ways? Could I include things of a more personal nature, and what would those personal things be? Was there room enough to grow? For example, adding things like Shagbottom Theater.

Growing content is important for an author platform. Keeping things relevant is equally important. Some of my topics aren’t covered as often as others, mostly due to the limited material I have to give them. I’m not going to slap together a post monthly when there is nothing to say about a particular topic. Readers will definitely sense there’s nothing of worth there, and that can harm outreach. Readers deserve quality posts.

Following this formula, I’ve watched my blog grow with readers. It’s a good feeling that all this hard work hasn’t gone to waste in a dark corner of the internet!

Let’s hop over to see what the other authors have to say about their startups…

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