The Blog Tour: Time Consuming and Rewarding (Part 2)

When you create your blog tour in the first place, it’s important to keep in mind how many days in a row you can write a blog post before going crazy. I was extremely impressed by Scott Nicholson’s tour because he was able to go for 90 consecutive days. I topped out around 20 before going a bit mad, but fortunately I composed myself enough for the last 14 :). I have seen blog tours that were just a week long and consisted of previously published material. I someday dream of doing a 365 day blog tour. Challenge yourself but keep your limits in mind.

Set up a time for yourself every day to write your post. Ideally, you want to give yourself at least a day or two before your due date to work on it. I loved working on the posts even more in advance so that I was able to give myself a day or two rest here and there throughout the tour. If you are sending the posts a week ahead of time, you will have written and sent about six posts before your first post goes up online.

Coming up with ideas for posts can be difficult but the rule of thumb is always to write something you’re interested about. If I felt like writing about happiness one day, I did. On Mother’s Day, I wrote a post about my parents because I was thinking about how they shaped me as a creative person. Try to run with the first thing that comes into your mind, as it’s difficult to be picky when you have 30+ posts to write about. If you can, try to scope out some of the posts on the blog you’ll be writing for, and see if you can come up with ideas based on the tone and subject matter. If all else fails, look at the posts you’ve already written on your site and try to take them in a different direction.

Once the first post goes up, it’s time for social marketing. You should post a link to the tour on your Facebook fan page, your Twitter page, post a comment on each page, and keep a running tab of the links on an aggregate page on your site. This is not just to spread the word far and wide but it also helps you to establish a strong relationship with these bloggers. An ideal situation for them is that your blog post is popular and generates more followers and revenue for them. You want the same for yourself. This is why if you market each post through your social networking channels (and they do the same through theirs), the tour can be a true win-win situation.

As the posts begin showing up online, this is a good time to begin keeping track of all the comments and entries for your giveaway. If you wait until the last second, you will be totally overwhelmed. One way to track new comments on each page is to subscribe to future comments when you post a “thank you” comment on each blog. This is not available for all blogging platforms, but it can be a major time saver on the blogs it is available for.

When all of your entries have been posted, make sure to send a big thank you to all of your blog hosts. Hopefully, they will have enjoyed your post and they’ll want you to come back in the future. To complete the giveaway, I usually use the Random Number Generator to pick the winner to be mathematically random in my selection.

If your blog posts are insightful and interesting, you will gain new followers and if all goes well your book sales will rise!