Use a Blog Tour to Promote Your Book, Product or Service

In the past, writers would have to endure the expense of time, talent and money as they traveled around the country from bookstore to bookstore generating buzz around their work and hawking their tome. Like everything else, the physical book tour has morphed to an online version – the Blog Tour.

Rather than a bookstore, an author instead approaches blogs she wishes to appear in – those with a similar readership, topic area, good subscription numbers, and page ranking. She then approaches each blogger and requests a guest posting on the blog for a future date. The blogger hosting that stop on the tour either posts a print interview or requests a certain topic that becomes a guest post. In the print interview format, the host blogger poses Larry King style questions to the author around the topics of the book. Once she’s lined up all her tour “stops,” she arranges them in a schedule and publicizes the calendar on her own blog, her subscribers, and social networking media.

The tour can reach beyond print media online to include live teleseminars which are then recorded, podcasts, and Internet radio. Janet’s tour includes all of these possibilities, thus providing a good sample of the range provided by an Internet tour.

For the last two months, author Janet Grace Riehl (pronounced “Real”) has been on an Internet tour promoting her audio book, “Sightlines A Family Love Story in Poetry and Song” which expands on her 2006 book “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” Both provide an intimate look at everyday American Life through Janet’s eyes, and the eyes of her 92 year old father, who is also a writer. I found the work riveting – I couldn’t stop listening to the CD’s and found myself getting drawn deeper and deeper into the web of Janet’s world.

Here’s a brief snippet to whet your appetite.

[I created this movie using Apple's iPhoto in under 5 minutes from pictures Janet sent me along with an audioclip from the Sightlines audiobook. The song is called "The Lost Waltz" by Erwin Thompson (Janet's 92 year-old dad)]

I agreed to be the final stop on Janet’s tour and serve as a public “debrief”, not only for Janet’s benefit, but also for all you writers (or public speakers, professional service providers, business owners, consultants, etc.) thinking about doing a blog tour of your own.

CCL: Janet, why did you want to do this blog tour?

JGR: For the book “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” our PR campaign was through hand-selling and public appearances in which I crafted talks around a theme.

For the audio book I wanted to put into practice all that I’d learned about Internet Marketing in the three years since I’d published the book in 2006.

I’d been part of four blog tours and felt ready to lead one on my own.

CCL: What were your objectives for the tour and how well did you achieve them?

JGR: My root goals with both book and audio book were to be useful and accessible to my audience—whether they were poetry fans or not. These goals worked for the book through the presentation of the work as Story Poems. For the audio book I included music recorded in my father’s parlor, Pop’s stories, and banter during the music session. This approach provided a wider and deeper context for the poems…and continued to reach a broader audience.

Of course I wanted to sell the stack of audio books stacked up in my father’s house. We still have some left, and we’ll continue to get the word out about the audio book after the tour.

Beyond that I wanted to increase the reach of the audience who knew about both products. I wanted to increase the reach about the poetry book as we expanded into an audio version…making it even more accessible. I wanted to strengthen my platform and my partnerships with my blogging buddies. In all these softer aims, the tour has been a complete success.

CCL: What were the biggest lessons you learned from the tour?

JGR: It’s been thrilling to continue to learning about Internet Marketing by engaging in it at this more targeted and expanded level. Targeting by concentrating the message in a contained and publicized time frame is extremely important. The tour builds over time and that’s been fun to watch.

Each host chooses to engage in the tour in different ways. It’s heartening to see those hosts who have totally thrown themselves into promoting the work as if it were their own by following the tour and promoting their stop via social networking media.

I wasn’t strategic about choosing the tour stops for page ranking. What always has worked best for me is working with people I know and like to work with. That’s what makes it fun. Of course, strategic positioning might lead to better sales results. I’ve just never been able to do that.

CCL: What elements of the tour worked the best for you? What worked the least?

JGR: Each element of the tour was provided “guaranteed entertainment” (challenge and education). In terms of marketing, it’s hard to parse out numbers to say what works best. My hunch is that the audio and visual elements appeal more to certain segments of the audience and the print elements are of greater interest to others.

CCL: What was the biggest surprise you got doing this tour?

JGR: How relatively easy it was to do once the administrative part of setting it up (grrrrrr…) was done.

CCL: What did you discover about yourself by doing this tour?

JGR: In 2006 I appeared on several podcasts to discuss (and read from) “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary. One of these podcasts was hosted by Yvonne Perry of Writers in the Sky. Yvonne records her podcasts using a service called Audio Acrobat.

At that time, I was really nervous before and during the call. This year, three years later? I was calm as a turtle sunning on a rock. Somehow I’d become an old hand at this business of answering questions out loud. It was funny, really…and a nice surprise.

CCL: If you were to do another tour, what would you do differently the next time?

JGR: I’d love to have a secretary to set up the admin part of the tour. That would reduce my aggravation level by 100 percent. It’s just an enormous amount of work, and not my strong suit.

CCL: Any tips, trick, hints, or words of wisdom or warning you’d like to pass along to others considering undertaking a blog tour?

JGR: My view on all the projects I embark upon is that I have to make it work for me. It has to fit who I am and what I love—that is, to live within the realm of my passion. There is a ton of advice out there on how to do almost everything. That’s okay to expose yourself to. But, in the end? Make it work for you. Set it up so that it makes you happy doing it, and after you’ve done it.

Blog tours need not only be for authors. Got a new product you want to share? Are you a consultant, public speaker, or a character people would be interested in? Have something about your business you want to shout to the world? A blog tour may be just the ticket!

Tagged as: blog tour, c-cole-lewis.com, Janet Grace Riehl, riehlife.com, sightlines