How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 3: Content and Keywords

Welcome to part three of the series I started with How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Pt. 1 (if you’re coming in new, you may want to start there).

Today we’re talking about choosing a niche for your blog, writing content that attracts book buyers (remember, we’re making money through affiliate links, so we need people to go on and buy books after reading our posts!), and using keywords that will help increase our search engine traffic.

This post isn’t designed to tell you what you have to write, but to help you turn what you want to write into posts people will find. Clear as mud? Good. Let’s get started!

Choosing a genre or “niche” for your blog

When it comes to reading, many of us have preferences for books in certain genres or (for non-fiction) niches. Others like to read across multiple genres, selecting all sorts of books that sound good to them. I don’t want to tell you what you can and can’t blog about, but you’ll do better, insofar as building a fan base and attracting readers goes, by sticking to a specific genre.

It’ll be a rare crowd that shares all your tastes, and people won’t necessarily feel the need to check in often if they’re only interested in a handful of books you blog about. If you blog about an already established genre (and maybe it’s broad such as science fiction and fantasy or narrow such as paranormal romance), you’ve got a ready crowd of folks who already identify themselves as readers of that genre. They can land on a back page of your blog, see from your tagline that you review “cozy mysteries” or “futuristic romances,” and know within seconds they’ve found their kind of place.

With a general book blog, things won’t be as easy because people have to hunt around and see if you’re reviewing things they like, and we just don’t like to waste a lot of time figuring things out. Just think about how quickly you hit your own back button if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the first couple of seconds on a site.

A niche blog with a tagline is going to make things easier all around.

Note:

I’ve seen a lot of new blogs pop up that tote themselves as ebook blogs or indie book blogs. For my money, that’s still too general. Just because I have a kindle doesn’t mean I’m interested in all ebooks; I’m still going to be drawn to SF/F stories. If you want to specialize in covering ebooks or indie books, great, but consider narrowing it further to a specific genre or niche.

Also, with genre-specific book blogs, once you build up an audience, your site will be very attractive to authors looking to advertise. While I talk a lot about affiliate programs, selling advertising can be an even easier way to make money. And, hey, if any of you start high fantasy or steampunk blogs that become popular, come look me up. I’ll be one of your first advertisers!

What to write about on your book blog

We’ve talked about choosing an overarching niche or genre to stick with, but what about specific posts? Naturally, it’s your blog and you can write about whatever you want, but if you want to make some money, it helps to think about what will entice people to go on and purchase the books you’re linking to.

Here are a couple ideas, but don’t let them limit you:

• Reviews are a great choice, both because they’re just the sort of content people would expect on a “book blog” and also because people reading reviews are likely looking for new books to buy, so why shouldn’t they buy them via your site and your links?
• Posts that highlight new releases in your genre can also do well. They’re simple to write up too, since, unlike book review posts, they don’t require you to have read the book.
• Over on my SF/F blog, I’ve had good luck putting together lists of books from specific categories. I’m still selling ebooks from a post I did months ago on 99-cent steampunk ebooks. A tongue-in-cheek list I made of ebooks to help readers survive the zombie apocalypse does well for me too.

Incorporating keywords into your titles and posts

I’ve done a lengthy explanation of keywords and how using them can increase the likelihood of folks finding your blog via search engines, so I’ll do a shorter overview here.

Keywords are the words or, more often, terms people type into search engines such as Google to find what they’re looking for.

For example, if a new book is out and there aren’t many (or any) reviews on Amazon yet, a potential buyer might search for author + book title + review. If you’ve written a post called “A look at the latest by author-name” then you’re not going to be as good of a match (in the search engine’s eyes) as someone who’s entitled their post “Review of Book Title by Author.”

It’s okay to add flair to your titles (and entice folks to click!), but try to hit on the words you think people would actually search for in your titles, and then use those terms a couple more times in the body of your post. You’ll get some bonus love from the search engines if you can get people to link to your post using those keywords (i.e. such-and-such book review), but we’ll talk more about link building later on.

You can tinker around with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (it’s designed for businesses running Adwords advertising campaigns, but it’s a free way to research keyword frequency on Google). Don’t be discouraged if something like an author’s specific book or even an author isn’t searched that often; that usually means it will be easy to rank at the top of the search engine results because there probably aren’t a lot of people blogging about said term either (at least not people who have a clue about search engine optimization, like you now do!).

For book reviews, it’s pretty obvious what good keywords would be to use, but you can sneak those keywords into other posts as well.

Suppose you did a list of new releases of romance books available for the Kindle. The Keyword Tool tells me “romance novels” is searched more often than “romance books” so I’d probably want to use the more popular term. Stick “kindle” and “ebooks” in your title, too, to attract those specific readers.

Note:

Popular terms (like the two-word terms I mentioned) are harder to rank for, since lots of established, popular sites usually hold the top slots. Three- and four-word phrases are less searched for but easier to rank for.

This is delving a little deeper than you probably need unless you’re the type who enjoys studying statistics and fiddling with this sort of thing. If you just try to use logical keywords in your titles and blog posts, trust me, you’ll be way ahead of most of your peers when it comes to book blogging!