How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 2: Blog Setup

As promised in “How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 1,” it’s time to get down to business. Today we’re covering where to start a blog, choosing a user-friendly theme and layout (just say no to excessive widgets, my friends!), and naming categories and posts to create search-engine friendly “permalinks.”

Where to Start Your Book Blog

If you’ve already been blogging for a while, this decision may have been made for you, but if you’re starting from scratch or thinking of doing something new, then read on….

Your choices are to host your blog on a free site, such as Blogger or WordPress.com, or to pay for web hosting, register your own domain name, and run your blog on your own site. I highly recommend the latter for authors, who probably want to do those things anyway to create a professional site to represent their books.

If all you’re going to do is write about other people’s books, sites like Blogger and WordPress are probably fine (I’d stay away from Livejournal and MySpace — among other reasons, they can appear clique-like and uninviting to new visitors). If you’re determined to create an ultra professional site and you could see growing it into more than a blog (i.e. maybe you’ll add a forum or start a podcast down the road), then consider investing in hosting and a domain name. You can get that for less than $100 a year.

Advantages of Setting up Your Blog on a Free Site:

• There’s no expense involved — This is huge. If you’re not making money yet, and you just want to test the waters with this whole book blogger thing, then it can make sense to wait before deciding to make a monetary investment.
• It can be easier to network with other bloggers — Blogger, in particular, has a lot of built-in networking features, making it easy for bloggers to interact each other and collect followers through the various widgets.
• It’s easy to set up and maintain your blog — There’s a wizard to guide you through setup, you don’t have to configure anything, and you don’t need to worry about installing upgrades to the blogging software down the road.

Advantages of Setting up Your Blog on Your Own Site:

• Total control — While Blogger, WordPress.com, etc. probably aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to run in a manner you like in the years to come. I’ve certainly seen Livejournal go from decent to annoying with its pop-up ads, and it’s always possible your free host will start implementing measures you don’t like.
• The ability to expand — As I mentioned, if you host your blog on your own site, it can be a part of your site instead of all there is. You can add a forum, add another feed for a podcast or even a second blog, create a storefront to sell your own ebooks, etc.
• No need to change later on — If you start with a free blog, you might want to switch to your own hosting and domain name later on. If you spent a lot of time getting links and building up your blog so it ranks well in the search engines, you’re essentially starting over if you move to a new web address.

My web host and blog platform:

I have a couple different types of accounts with different hosts for work and play, and I’d say Blue Host (affiliate link) is the most solid of them. They’re not the cheapest (right now, they have a package that costs $6.95 a month and comes with free domain name registration), but they have better customer service than some of the lower priced ones I’ve tried. Also, they have a “one-click WordPress install,” which makes it easy to get a blog up and running.

WordPress is the most popular blog platform out there, and it’s what I use to run this site and the other blogs I have. It’s free, and it’s updated frequently (good for security purposes), so it’s hard to beat. You can find gazillions of free themes, or you can have a custom one made.

Note: There’s a difference between having a free blog at WordPress.com and running the WordPress software on your own site.

Choosing a Theme and Layout

If you’re on Blogger, you’ll probably just grab one of the themes already available. Easy peasy.

If you install WordPress, you can Google “free wordpress themes” and spend days browsing through all the options. Installing a theme isn’t tough, though you’ll need to be comfortable using an FTP tool. You can always pay a tech-savvy friend to handle everything for you if you decide to go the blog-on-your-own-site route.

As far as choosing a theme, simpler is usually better. You’re welcome to ignore my advice and flex your creative muscles, but having a lot of stuff on a page tends to distract the eye from the important things (like those affiliate links you want folks to click!).

When it comes to colors, dark text on a light background is a lot easier to read than light text on a dark background. When I was younger, I didn’t think anything of reading a white font on a black background at night with the lights off, but I wear glasses these days (probably because of those earlier computer habits…), and I don’t want to read that stuff anymore. Generally, anything that can stand between you and your audience should be avoided.

In regards to awards, widgets, and banners running up and down the sidebars…it’s your call, but, again, simpler tends to be better when the goal is to make money. All other factors being equal, folks like to relax in tidy and uncluttered places rather than chaotic ones.

One last comment here: beware of giant headers.

If you love your huge, artistic header and want to keep it, go for it, but the area “above the fold” (the portion of your blog visible without scrolling down) is considered prime real estate in the web world. It’s what people see first, and that first impression is often what prompts them to stay on a site or click “back.” If the headings of your posts aren’t visible without scrolling down, visitors might make a snap decision that what they’re looking for isn’t on your blog and click away without bothering to explore further.

Name Categories and Creating Search-Engine-Friendly Titles & Permalinks

Categories are important. They allow readers to easily browse to old posts they may be interested, and they also help with search engine optimization (AKA the fine art of ranking in the search engine results for terms related to your posts and blog niche).

Organizing blog posts by month/date doesn’t do anything for your readers or the search engines. Nobody cares when you reviewed the latest epic fantasy bestseller; they just want to be able to find your epic fantasy category and see the books you’ve reviewed there.

With WordPress, it’s easy to create categories. With Blogger, you can use the labels feature to create tag clouds that can serve the same purpose. Just try not to use a lot of obscure labels that will result in a huge cloud that’s not particularly useful for people trying to find things.

If I maintained a book blog on fantasy novels, I’d probably have categories or labels/tags like epic fantasy, steampunk, swords and sorcery, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, dark fantasy, etc.

In addition to using search-engine friendly categories, it’s helpful to choose titles and permalinks that make it clear what the post is about.

By the way, the permalink is the permanent link to your blog post (i.e. …buroker.com/tips-and-tricks/how-to-make-mo…blogger-part-2/). That last part is what will change for each post. Blogger and WordPress will automatically fill this in based on your title, but you can also choose to change it (sometimes I shorten mine if the helper words aren’t important for the search engines).

Choosing titles and permalinks that tell people what the post is about seems obvious, but I see a lot of book reviews that don’t have the author or book title in the title of the post. For people surfing in from the search engines, the title of your post and a tiny snippet from the site is all they see. They’re much more likely to click on a link that clearly offers what they’re looking for (Book Review of Such-and-Such by So-and-So) over one that may or may not have something to do with what they’re looking for.

Also…if you’re not using the title/author in your post title, your site probably won’t appear anywhere near the top of the search engine rankings for that book title anyway. Believe it or not, your best traffic is most likely to come from the search engines (people actively searching for information and reviews for a product are usually doing so because they’re thinking of buying it), so it’s worth putting the effort into attracting those folks.

We’re going to talk more about pleasing those search engines in the next “how to make money” post, in which we’ll take a quick look at keywords and how to integrate them into your posts.