How Authors Can Use a Blog to Promote a Cause or Issue

By Nina Amir

As an aspiring or published author, you’ve probably heard this advice: You need a blog.

The reasons are always the same. A blog helps you develop your author platform, create a brand, build expert status, and promote your books. But did you know you can do something even more meaningful with a blog?

You can start a movement.

If the reason you want to become an author involves a cause, calling, or soul purpose, a blog provides the best tool to get people involved in your mission. You can start your movement, gather a community of like-minded people and even write your book—all with a blog.

Does a blog and blogging sound a bit more attractive now? Ready to get things moving?

Your Blog Attracts People to Your Cause

First, start your blog with the intention of having it serve as the primary website for your movement or cause. Then:

• Brand it in a manner that lets visitors immediately know why and how to get involved.
• Develop a blogging plan to help you focus on post subjects related to your mission.
• Publish posts regularly and consistently.
• Share your posts on social networks.

These actions send your message out to the world and help you attract people who are interested in your cause back to your website.

The reason this strategy works is simple. Every time you publish a blog post, the bots, spiders and crawlers—computer programs—from Google and other search engines show up to “read” what you’ve written. They catalog the keywords, or search terms, in your posts. The more often they find the same keywords, the more often they “file” your blog under those terms.

If you publish posts often and consistently, and if you focus your posts on the topic of your movement, your site rises quickly in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Before long, people who search for related terms find your website—your blog—on the first Google SERP. Maybe you’ll even have #1 Google ranking, which means your site is listed first on the first page of a Google search.

Develop a Community

When visitors arrive at your site, you want them to read and share your posts. You also want to encourage them to become part of your community and to take up your cause. After all, movements begin when like-minded folks join your efforts to create change on some level.

Here are two ways to create your community:

1. Create an online community simply with a Facebook Page or a LinkedIn or Google Plus group. Doing so costs you nothing, and you can set one up quickly. Promote your gathering place on your blog in a banner or a widget. Provide a link so visitors easily can click through and “join.”
2. Set up a forum on your site. If you have a WordPress site, this requires a plugin, some of which are free while others require you pay a fee. A forum on your site gives you control over it. You also “own” it. You don’t need to worry about Facebook disappearing or changing algorithms, making it hard for people to find your group.

You also can create a MeetUp, a high-traffic site that give people a way to find your cause online but meet with you in person. Promote the meetings on your site. You can even discuss the events in your blog posts.

Use Your Blog to Change the World

If you want to write a book that inspires change (and you’d like to do that rather than blog), don’t worry. Blogging doesn’t have to stop you from this pursuit. Instead, it can support your authorship efforts.

Combine your blog and book writing by blogging your book. Compose your manuscript in post-sized bits that you publish on your blog. These short installments—posts of from 300 to 700 words—of your book comprise parts of a chapter. As such, the posts work like a long series all focused on one topic or theme—your movement.

As you blog your book, you attract people to your movement and to your site. You give Google and the other search engines content to catalog, which improves the discoverability of your site. That gets your site even more traffic. In the process, you also produce a manuscript for your change-inspiring book. Your book and blog help you author change.

That’s a pretty good reason—a meaningful reason—to blog, don’t you think?

To learn more about blogging books and booking blogs, purchase a copy of How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition.

About the Author
Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, is the bestselling author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual.  She’s also a speaker, blogger, author—and a book, blog-to-book and high-performance coach—who helps people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and positively and meaningfully impact the world as writers, bloggers, authorpreneurs, and blogpreneurs. Some of Nina’s clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. As a hybrid author, she has published 15 books and had as many as four books on an Amazon Top 100 list at the same time. To find out more about Nina and get a free goal-achievement ebook, visit NinaAmir.com. Receive a set of free blog-plan templates when you visit HowtoBlogaBook.com or a free guide to writing a nonfiction book at WriteNonfictionNow.com.