Publicizing Your Blog

by Elaine Hirsch

Bloggers need readers. If you write for money, you must find ways to publicize your blog for it to ever become a viable venture financially. It's all too easy for any blog to be lost among the millions of others if you don't make a concerted and sustained effort to promote it. Fortunately you don't need a PhD to do a little online promotion.

Of course, your blog's content and design are the two most important things to focus on initially. Once you've created and built up a blog that will grab people's attention, it's time to publicize it. Here are some in-depth methods you can use to get your blog read by the world:

Submit your blog to major search engines.

Having your blog indexed by the major search engines greatly increases your chances of being found by relevant searches. Google, Yahoo, and Bing make it very easy to submit your blog to their indices. There are two different ways you can speed the indexing process. First, you can manually submit your blog's URL to Google and other search engines. Second, you can embed meta-code directly into your site allowing search engine spiders to crawl and index your blog.

Some blogging platforms will do this for you. For instance, if you use Wordpress, on your blog's dashboard is a section called “tools.” Go into “available tools” and you'll notice a section for verifying your site with different search engines. Follow the links in that section to obtain three different meta-tags to enter into the blank fields.

Submit your blog to blog directories.

The big search engines aren't the only ways readers find blogs. Some dedicated directories specifically index blogs in general or in particular niches for search results. Being in these directories increases your blog's chances of being found by users specifically looking for blogs to read.

Inclusion in blog directories is especially useful for bloggers who frequently address common questions, needs, or problems. The more problems you address, the more likely your blog will show up on various blog directories when users search in the form of questions.

Submitting your site to blog directories is fairly easy. Often all you need to do is enter your site's URL. You may be asked to temporarily include a certain code in your site's HTML or post the code as a blog entry. The blog directories will look for that code to verify your site.

Promote your blog on social networking sites.

With over 800 million users, Facebook alone could be its own country. You can reach a wide audience by promoting your blog on various social media platforms. The three most popular sites, at the moment, are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Google+ is also quickly growing, and LinkedIn is popular as an expressly professional network.

The Wordpress and Blogger platforms allow you to connect your blog with your social media accounts. You'll usually have the option of immediately sharing new posts on all connected sites simultaneously.

Social media are effective because they're personal. You can communicate with your readers directly, in addition to the exchange of ideas that (hopefully) occurs in your blog's comments. Most importantly, social media allow your readers to easily and directly share your writing with other users you might not reach otherwise. This allows what without social media might've just been a good post to snowball into a massive increase in traffic and readership.

While there are many ways to publicize blogs, there are only a handful of methods that are truly effective. Beyond the basics of putting out good content through an engaging site, simply making it easy for readers to find your blog and sharing it through the online connections you'll develop will go a long way. Hopefully these three tips will give you a good idea of where to start publicizing your writing and expanding your readership.

Elaine Hirsch is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and videogames. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead.

19 Ways to Get More Readers for Your Author Blog

by Joel Friedlander

Author blogs are an intrinsic part of your author platform. You can get more readers for your blog. You may have read many of these ideas before, but let me ask you: How many have you done in the last 30 days?

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. You are building a media asset, and that takes time. Many of these techniques take a little effort and can be done in a few minutes a day. There is never going to be a day when you do them all at once, so look at it more like a menu.

1.       Write more often—if you don’t have enough traffic, write more often. This is not necessarily good news, since you may feel you already have enough to do. But when you’re growing a blog, there’s no better way to increase the energy flow to your blog than increasing the amount of energy you put into your blog.

2.       Write better articles—look at the last 10 articles you’ve posted to your blog. How many did people really care about? How many did you write for yourself, more than your readers? If you have to, and in contradiction to #1 above, write less frequently but better.

3.       Do something different—give readers a reason to come to your blog. If you’re doing what everyone else in your niche is doing, why should they? What is it that no one has done? What angle is uncovered? What insight is lacking in the conversation?

4.       Do something big—create a big list, a smashing resource directory, an exhaustive collection of tools, a survey of every viewpoint on a subject. Whatever it is, make it useful, the kind of thing you yourself would link to or bookmark for future reference.

5.       Kidnap a celebrity—interview the biggest star in your niche, or the most controversial, or the person with the biggest blog in your field. Aim as high as you can, you will be surprised. Make a regular feature of profiling or interviewing movers and shakers in your industry.

6.       Start an argument—disagree loudly with an established authority in your field, an “A-list” blogger, or the institutional overseers of your domain. Demand a response.

7.       Rant—find an injustice in your field, something blatantly unfair or a monopolistic company taking advantage of the little guy. Rant about it, invite others to contribute.

8.       Guest post—take your show on the road. Create a goal to contribute to someone else’s blog on a related topic once a week, once a month, whatever you can do. Query bloggers and read their archives. Fashion a headline for an article they’ll find irresistible.

9.       Comment—leave comments that add to the discussion, that amplify what others have said, that disagree respectfully with the author, that bring something to the table. Pick 5 or 10 blogs and stay in touch with them, commenting when appropriate.

10.   Upload articles—put some articles on articles sites like ezinearticles.com and make sure you link back to your blog. Use the same keywords you use in your blog posts.

11.   Explore your analytics—dive into your blog’s analytics to find the keywords people are using to arrive at your blog, then. . .

12.   Research keywords—use keyword tools to find as many keywords related to your blog as you can. Compare different forms of common terms in your field, since they can have radically different search volumes. Use this information when you write your blog posts.

13.   Curate content—serve up links to content elsewhere that you’ve checked out. Use your expertise and the time you spend surfing to collect links that others will find useful. Use social media to spread these links and do link posts on your blog to save others the time of finding great content.

14.   Run contests—have a regular contest, giveaway, prize, sweepstakes, awards or some way to create an event. Use your blog to promote it and ask participants to link back.

15.   Frequent forums—make a habit of commenting on forum threads that concern your topic. Like commenting, aim to improve, amplify or otherwise contribute to the ongoing conversation. Don’t forget to put a link to your blog in your signature that shows up when you post a comment.

16.   Give something away—put together an e-book, a PDF, a template, a checklist, a special report, a worksheet or anything else that others can get real value from. Give it away every day, not just once. Make sure people know they can share it with everyone, and remember to put a live link back to your blog in the giveaway.

17.   Write list posts—write the top 7 things, the best 9 widgets, the 5 things people haven’t considered, the 9 top places to get stuff, the 5 best tools for the job, and the 3 reasons list posts beat all others.

18.   Take a course—there are several excellent blogging courses that will teach you a huge amount about blogging and gaining traffic. Blog Mastermind is the one I used to grow this blog, and you can find others. Invest in yourself, it pays. (affiliate link)

19.   Ask readers—run a survey, ask for comments, ask your readers what they need, what articles they would like to read, where they are stuck, what they need help with.

Blogging is more fun, and more effective, when you have more readers. Every blogger wants more readers, but you have to spend time on more than just your writing to get that blog traffic.

Pick a couple of these ideas and put in 15 minutes today. It takes many little streams to build to a river.

Got something to add to the list?

Article by Joel Friedlander

Joel Friedlander is a self-published author and book designer who blogs about book design, self-publishing and the indie publishing life at TheBookDesigner.com. He's also the proprietor of Marin Bookworks, where he helps publishers and authors who decide to publish get to market on time and on budget with books that are both properly constructed and beautiful to read.

Writers’ Blogs: 5 Essentials for Engaging Your Readers

by Joel Friedlander

The instructions to authors have been repeated up and down the publishing line over and over: blog, blog, blog.

Last year, Simon & Schuster urged all their writers to get going on their author blogs. Every author I’ve spoken to in the last year has told me they are either trying to get a blog started or planning on setting one up soon.

Traveling the web, you come across many of these blogs. Some are lively places where readers and bloggers spend time together. Too many others look like ghost towns, places rarely visited, and not welcoming to the casual passerby.

How did all these blogs end up abandoned, dusty and neglected?

We can’t know for sure since we weren’t there. But I know the thing that makes or breaks your blog, if you’re an author trying to attract a community of readers: reader engagement.

And I don’t just mean readers who don’t visit or don’t leave comments or don’t participate in events, either. This is what I do mean:

 I mean bloggers who don’t engage their readers. Bloggers who write about whatever comes into their head, or about nothing at all.

 I mean bloggers who publish sporadically, whose writings vary in quality, in voice, in subject matter.

 I mean bloggers who appear to have given no thought at all to what readers might actually want to read or learn about.
 And I also mean bloggers who use their blogs as a place to post bits and pieces of various works in progress as a way of fulfilling their “blogging quota.”
How to Tell When Someone Cares

The blogs I read regularly are the ones that engage me as a reader. They leave me satisfied that the blogger has produced something useful, or entertaining, or educational, or all three. I get the feeling the blogger actually knows the kind of information I’m looking for and is working to give it to me. I trust them. And so I follow them.

Now what appeals to me, what engages me, may not be what appeals to you. But there are things bloggers can do to get people excited, make them happy they read your post, and make them want more from you.

As authors, we ought to be able to use our blogs to test just how appealing our ideas are, shouldn’t we? After all, if we can’t attract an audience and involve people in what we care about, how much success can we imagine for the books we want to publish?

So blogging, besides all the other benefits you can get from it, is also a great place to test ideas you want to publish. Why? It puts both the writing and the marketing of your content directly into your own hands. Not only that, it allows you to measure, on a daily basis, just how successful your writing has been.

We all want our blogs to be “sticky.” We want readers to anticipate the next post, leave comments, tell their friends, tweet our articles and do all those things we do when we’re really engaged. But you’ve got to have a good foundation to begin with. Here are some tips to get grounded and get started on your engaging writer blog.

5 Essentials for Engaging Your Blog Readers

1. Make sure you know what your blog is about. If you write about Egypt today, and what you’re planning for lunch tomorrow, and your work in progress on Friday, can you blame readers for being a bit confused about what your blog is about? We’re all interested in many things, but usually only one at a time. Pick a subject and stick to it. If you can’t, at least make a stab at explaining or showing why this is related to your topic.

2. Have a publishing schedule. Bloggers are media publishers, plain and simple. If Time magazine decided to be a monthly, then switched to weekly, then started publishing every day, then didn’t publish for a couple of months, I don’t think they would have many subscribers? Whatever schedule is comfortable for you is likely to work. It’s really important, I think, to enjoy blogging, because people can tell your mood when you write.

3. Take care of your readers. It doesn’t matter how many readers you have today, take care of them. Take care of them by being on time, answering questions or comments, and thinking about who you’re writing for and why they might come to visit your site.

4. Get familiar with analytics. Blogging is at the foundation of web interaction. In its simplest form, you publish content, and invite comment. This two-way conversation is one of the things that makes blogging such a powerful way to connect with your readers. Analytics helps you to find out which articles resonate weeks or months later, which ones continue to provide enough value that they keep attracting traffic long after they’ve been publishing. That information is incredibly valuable to you as a publisher.

5. Ask for it. Hey, if you never ask, how will readers know you want their opinion, their input, their comments? As writers, sometimes we get caught up in the creative process. We live inside our heads a lot, maybe we’re used to sitting in a dark room by ourselves and the whole idea of social interaction is a bit weird. But this works: if you want a response, ask for it directly. “I’d love to hear your opinions on this issue. Please let me know by leaving a comment.” Do it.

So let’s recap: Having a focus for a blog that publishes regularly, cares about its readers, works to find subjects in which they are interested, and asks for involvement is much more likely to promote reader engagement. These are all things within the reach of authors who blog, so go out there and engage, you’ll be glad you did.

Joel Friedlander is a self-published author and book designer who blogs about book design, self-publishing and the indie publishing life at TheBookDesigner.com. He's also the proprietor of Marin Bookworks, where he helps publishers and authors who decide to publish get to market on time and on budget with books that are both properly constructed and beautiful to read.

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This Week's Podcast Guest: Sherree Rogers

Join us for a conversation with writer Sherree Rogers as she speaks about her memoir, Who Will Cry For Me?

As a child, Sherree endured years of agonizing abuse, molestation and abandonment. Her only outlet was her love of writing, which she used to purge her pain.

Today Sherree is a well-adjusted, happy woman, with a husband, children and a succesful career with a major telecommunications company. She has written a number of articles on a variety of topics and contributes to a children's newsletter. Her life now, she says, is blissfully normal.



Who Will Cry For Me? shares Sherree's journey from victim of abuse to a healthy, self-actualized adult. She has written her story so that she may help others realize that they too can heal. It is also an excellent tool for family members, friends and spouses to support loved ones recovering from traumatic experiences.


Click here to listen to the podcast


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6 Simple SEO Tips for Authors

by Joel Friedlander

Lots of authors blog now, but blogging isn’t just about writing. There’s no way to avoid the technology side of blogging.

Although you can hire someone to take care of installing software and setting up elements of your blog, the responsibility for your regular blog posts falls on you, as the blogger.

For instance you have to set your own schedule and editorial focus. Beyond that, we all hope that through our blogging we’ll attract readers and eventually sell books.

Particularly for nonfiction authors, it really pays to learn how to optimize your blog posts for searchers. A few simple practices can help you attract the kind of people you want.

Simple SEO Practices for Authors Who Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge field with practices that change regularly because search engines keep getting better at delivering quality links to searchers, and website owners continue to seek an edge over their competitors by trying to make their own site appear high in the search results.

Having said that, there are simple things you can do when you create blog posts or online articles that will help your rankings in the search engine results dramatically.

I do this often with the articles I write here, and I take it seriously enough that I’ve invested in some tools to help with SEO tasks. But there are a lot of things you can do quite easily if you know how.

To make this even easier to understand, I’ve broken it down into 6 items to pay attention to. Each of these is pretty simple to master and together they are going to help bring targeted readers to your blog.

Anchor text

This is the text that you use for a link, and it can be a powerful SEO tool if you use it properly.

For instance, if I want to put a link into an article about my blog, it might occur in a sentence like this:

click here for info on the great blog about books, thebookdesigner.com

But what part of that sentence should you use for the actual link? Many bloggers pay no attention to this, but look at the choices you have, and the effects of each.

click here for info on the great blog about books, thebookdesigner.com

With this choice you get the click, but nothing else.

click here for info on the great blog about books, thebookdesigner.com

Reinforces the domain name being linked to, so you get extra emphasis from that.

click here for info on the great blog about books, thebookdesigner.com

Bingo. This amounts to a vote for the website being linked to as a “great blog about books.”

When you create links, think about the text you use to anchor the link, and what it’s saying about the site you’re linking to. Anchor text is a special and powerful form of emphasis and using it well will help your search engine results.

This is also why getting a domain name with one of your keywords in it pays off in so many ways. Every time someone links to your site using your domain name—the most common form of anchor text—it’s another vote for your site as a good place for information on that keyword.

Link Juice

What I mean by juice is the authority and influence passed along through a link from a website with a higher ranking than yours.

So if you can obtain a link from a highly-regarded and high ranking website, some of their influence will pass on to you, raising your own profile in search.

How do you get link juice? There are lots of strategies, but the best way is to produce useful, essential, or mind-bendingly great content that everyone wants to link to, then market that content by letting people know about it. They will pass it along to their own networks of influence.

Title tag

This is another crucial element in your SEO efforts when writing blog posts. The title tag is an HTML field on your webpage or blog post that is scanned by search engines to determine the content of your article. It’s basically the headline you write for your article, but some blogging software also gives you access directly to the title tag.

That’s why you need to make sure the subject of your article and anything else you want people to link to appear in the title tag. This is where the keywords that are associated with your article need to show up in the title. Researching the keywords people use to find information about your subject is one of the most productive things you can do if you want to find more traffic for your blog.

First paragraph

Again, this is an important place that search engines will look for content information and emphasis. Putting a link in the first paragraph, and making sure you use keyword-rich anchor text and link to great content that’s directly related to your article—whether that content is your own or someone else’s—helps to powerfully reinforce the other SEO actions you’ve taken.

Link out

Providing links in your articles gives more opportunities to emphasize anchor text and to expand the reach of your article by providing more resources and related content to readers.

On my blog, for example, I’ll typically have 6 to 8 links in a 1,000-word article. Whether these are clustered in a “Resource” section or scattered throughout the text, they position the article in the sea of related articles and show how it connects to other writers, to other subjects, and to other articles here on the blog.

Link deep

Another way to use SEO tools for your own benefit and to help your readers is to make sure you link to your own posts on the same topic.

This might be as simple as mentioning related articles, but you can take it much further. For instance, you can essentially cast votes for one of your own articles by repeatedly linking it to it in subsequent posts.

For instance, I’ve also written on this subject when I addressed how nonfiction authors can use keyword marketing. The link in the preceding sentence points to one of those earlier articles.

And even if you have a blog, don’t neglect the affection that search engines have for well-organized hierarchical pages. With software like WordPress it’s as easy to create pages of evergreen reference material as it is to create daily blog posts.

Add structure by creating detail pages as sub-pages of your top-level pages, and you’ll get even more of an effect.

Conclusion—But it Never Ends

SEO is by its nature an ongoing and ever-changing study. As search engines continue to evolve, and as the efforts of optimizers continue to find ways to “game” the system, the rules and practices of search engine optimization will continue to change.

But understanding today’s best practices and putting them to use can have a dramatic effect on how popular your articles become, how many readers are sent to your site by search engines, and your audience growth or influence reach.
Joel Friedlander is a self-published author and book designer who blogs about book design, self-publishing and the indie publishing life at TheBookDesigner.com. He's also the proprietor of Marin Bookworks, where he helps publishers and authors who decide to publish get to market on time and on budget with books that are both properly constructed and beautiful to read.

 

Blogs are all very well, but …

By Rick James

I thought I’d wanna try to say something here that maybe all you peeps would wanna listen to but if you don’t then I don’t care and you don’t have to read it so I don’t care if you like my writing or even if you read it or are reading now, and if you are maybe – just maybe – you do … your choice.

Eh? What? No, me neither.

And you think I’m kidding. I wish I was – I really do. However, regrettably, the above is an example of one of the less improbable run-on sentences I’ve seen in some blogs.

In response to various articles on the writers groups at Linkedin and other book marketing forums about the relevance of writer’s blogs as a tool, I think it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Yes, blogs are a brilliant idea, a great sample of your writing and a useful calling card to allow those beyond your current personal and professional sphere of friends and colleagues to sample your work.

Moreover, they give an author a sort of digital shop window onto the world for his books, poems short stories and associated musings, with the unique attraction being the “soft sell” nature of the enterprise. How so? Unlike a web site, the dissemination of free and hopefully fun and useful information is the motivation to subscribe.

So why mcuk ti up wth speling like ths?

Again, I’m not kidding. I’m pretty certain spell checker programs are free with word processing programs these days, so unless an author is transcribing something he has hand written from a roll of toilet paper by using his big toes to type it onto his keyboard, no excuse guys! None at all.

And the knock-on effect of poor grammar isn’t great either. Web users in particular and avid readers in general are pretty intuitive these days; in short, don’t think your readership needs a degree in English literature to spot bad writing!

And by association, if you can’t write a blog why should anyone suspect you can write a book?

Am I being too pedantic? I don’t think so. Yes, I understand a blog can also be a space for a writer to be experimental, and “to be himself” without the more formalized editing requirements of a novel, for example, but too many obvious and basic grammatical errors are strikes against one’s professional goals. Anyone calling himself a writer must surely see that?

So, grammatically-speaking, don’t shoot yourself and your blog in the foot.

You can break all the rules and be a literary rebel, no problem. You can dismiss popular opinion! Go ahead!

Sod the industry!

Write whatever you want to write!

But the fact remains: you owe it to your work and to your readers to whip your blog into as good a shape as can be; you owe it to your creative goals and ideas. After all, what other tools does a writer have to convey them?

You owe it to yourself.

Rick James is an author, speaker, blogger and teacher living in London, England. He can frequently be found people watching on the streets of East London to get inspiration for his weird and wonderful fictional creatures and monsters and ranting, fantasy-tinged tweets. http://thefantasynovelist.wordpress.com/

5 Reasons Authors Should Be Blogging Right Now

by Joel Friedlander

I’ve been asked to give a talk on author blogging next month, and it’s got me thinking. I’ll be speaking to a group of self-publishers, authors, indie publishers, and people who provide publishing or marketing services.

We talk a lot about author blogging, and why it’s a great idea for authors to create an author platform. Yet very few authors I know write regularly about their book, or its subject matter, or about anything at all.

Most blogs, in fact, are probably abandoned early in their life. There must be millions of “ghost” blogs around the internet, sitting in that same kind of stasis the old mining towns are in when someone stumbles on them in a movie set out west.

What Seems to Be the Problem?

The classic mistake made by self-publishers is not thinking about marketing until their books are at the printer. They are too busy, too wrapped up in the manuscript, or they don’t want to step so far out of their comfort zone.

I get this, I really do. We’re all busy, and marketing seems to most self-publishers like something somebody else does. But not any more.

If you’re like most self-publishers, you’ll be doing a lot of your marketing online, and that’s where a blog is going to help you out. You’ll be setting up an outpost on the internet, establishing a brand, and you can’t start too early.

Maybe you won’t have three years to blog before your book comes out, but it wouldn’t hurt. Whatever time you have, it’s important to make use of it.

Why? Read on.

5 Reasons to Start Blogging Now

1. Nothing happens at first—Although you can get started blogging within minutes, it takes time to build up some content and to get taken seriously by search engines. Lots of blogs are abandoned soon after they start, and search engines know this. Starting now is your best option, because you immediately start the clock ticking on getting search traffic.

2. It takes practice—You may be a perfectly good writer, but you’ve been writing books, or articles for trade magazines, or press releases or whatever. Blogging has its own rationale, and blog posts are not like other types of writing. You’ll need a bit of time to get used to the form.

3. You need to find readers—Maybe you’re an amazing writer, but there are a lot of choices for people who spend time online. At first, no one will know you’re there, and building a community of readers is an organic process.

4. Work on building connections—As your blog grows, you’ll naturally start to connect with other bloggers in your field. You may be surprised at how many connections you can make this way, and that there’s a supportive community you can become a part of.

5. Branding doesn’t happen in a day—Whether you realize it or not, you are creating an online author brand, a media presence, by building your blog. Brands have tremendous power over our buying decisions, but it takes time and repeated exposure to get traction for your brand.

Of course, the whole idea is that after you’ve been blogging for a while, establishing authority, building readership, gaining trust by delivering content of authentic value, there will be a payoff.

Imagine yourself a year or two in the future. You’ve done all these things, maybe because you read this article or another one like it. Now it’s time to release your book. You have an audience waiting, other bloggers ready to help spread the word, and access to media sources through your blog.

A Fine Example

This isn’t a fantasy or out of your reach. I’ve been watching (and helping) Joanna Penn, who blogs at The Creative Penn, as she launches Pentecost, her first novel. It will be a great success. Know why? She has spent the last couple of years connecting to people, delivering content of value, engaging readers and peers alike. Hundreds of people have voted in her polls about choosing a cover for the book. Everyone is anticipating its release.

Wouldn’t you like to publish your next book to an eager and waiting community of fans?

Start blogging today.

Joel Friedlander is a self-published author, a book designer and blogs about book design, self-publishing and the indie publishing life at TheBookDesigner.com. He's also the proprietor of Marin Bookworks, where he helps publishers and authors who decide to publish get to market on time and on budget with books that are both properly constructed and beautiful to read.

Blogging and Life: Should You Write to a Deadline?

by Joel Friedlander

As usual, life intervenes in even our long-held plans. I had planned to do one more post about the year I’ve spent blogging on TheBookDesigner to follow up the Top Ten Blog Posts of My Rookie Blogging Year and Keywords posts I wrote last week.

Instead, let me ask you a question: Do you write to a deadline? It seems like I often come across stories by print journalists—or former print journalists—who talk about how their training as a reporter taught them how to write. The deadline and the absolute need to file your story on time gave them important skills.

For instance, they learned to get to the heart of the story quickly. To write a great lead-in. To leave time for at least one last check before sending the story on its way. And to get it in no matter what.

A Year of Daily Deadlines

Many people have asked me over the year “how I manage to do it” that is, keep blogging day after day. My experience has been a bit different, and I’ll tell you how.

The big commitment for me was right at the beginning. I knew that if I committed to write the blog every day for a year, that was exactly what I was going to do. Everything that happened during the year, at least as far as my intention is concerned, came from that first decision.



So it has gone over the year. The deadline I set for myself was midnight. That way, I could publish each blog article at 12:01 a.m. and have each post up for the entire 24-hour cycle of the day before the next post was due.

Every day I have had to come up with a topic, something of value to you, to write about. And then turn that into an article without too many typos, something readable by normal people.

Having this deadline hasn’t always been easy.

Have there been times I’ve sat, staring at the screen at 11:00 p.m., my mind a blank? Or spent an hour clicking through Google Alerts or Feedburner feeds looking for that elusive thread that will become an article?

Yes, maybe too many times.

Have I dreamt of the day I would be able to schedule posts a few days or a few weeks in advance, and avoid the daily deadline? Almost every day.

But Deadlines Are Good For You

On the other hand, I’ve been incredibly productive. After yesterday’s post, I’ve written and published exactly 400 articles in a little over 14 months.

The experience of producing all these articles has made me a better writer, and a more focused one. I see the point of an article or story much sooner now.

In the mornings I’ve been able to reel off 1,000-word articles in about 40 minutes quite regularly. The thread of the stories, the line that they will follow to get from a beginning to an end, appears earlier.

Maybe it’s like going to the gym for a year. You would expect your muscles to respond to working regularly, to grow stronger and more capable, wouldn’t you?

I’m saying you may be able to get that in your writing, too.

And I don’t think it matters much what your deadline is. You could be writing 100 words a day, or a page a week, or two blog posts a week, or whatever suits you.

No, the real punch here comes from this: Whatever your schedule, tell yourself that the deadline you’ve set is completely inflexible, and must be met at all costs.

That’s it. The secret to becoming a more brawny writer. Make a deadline, then write to it as if your life depended on it.

Joel Friedlander is a self-published author, a book designer and blogs about book design, self-publishing and the indie publishing life at TheBookDesigner.com. He's also the proprietor of Marin Bookworks, where he helps publishers and authors who decide to publish get to market on time and on budget with books that are both properly constructed and beautiful to read.

And the Award Goes To.....

Recently Claudia Del Balso was very kind to award me with The Versatile Blogger Award. Thank you, Claudia! (To visit her blog, click here http://www.claudiadelbalso.blogspot.com/) I am passing the award to 15 bloggers. You may be one of them.

There are four rules that come with this award:

1 - thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them when creating the award post
2 - share seven things about yourself
3 - pass the award on to 15 recently discovered blogs
4 - contact the bloggers to let them know about the award

Seven facts about myself:

1) I am the Owner of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services.
2) My spiritual name is LavendarRose and I have a podcast that allows people to share profound paranormal insight.
3) I enjoy networking with people.
4) I offer a weekly podcast about the craft and business of writing.
5) I like to sew & decorate.
6) I have 10 grandkids and one on the way.
7) I am the Author of The Sid Series.

I've chosen 15 of my favorite bloggers for this award based on the quality and message of their blogs (it was really difficult for me to choose as I like a slew of blogs out there). For those I have listed, please don't feel obligated to follow up on the rules of the award. By the way, the nominees are in no particular order.

1) Christa hosts book reviews and blog tours on Fictionary. www.cballan.wordpress.com
2) Barbara and Frankie Techel’s blog for disabled pets: http://www.frankiethewalknrolldog.blogspot.com/
3) Nancy Allen's blog: http://nancykellyallen.blogspot.com/
4) Marta does book reviews, hosts blog tours and giveaways on her blog at http://martasmeanderings.blogspot.com/
5) Mindy P. Lawrence will review books she feels are worthy of five-stars. http://www.freewebs.com/mplcreative
6) Autumn Heartsong's blog is about spiritual/personal development: http://heartsongshymnal.blogspot.com
7) Vonnie Faroqui's blog is for writers and authors: http://inkslingerswhimsey.blogspot.com
8) Ginger Simpson http://mizging.blogspot.com
9) L. Diane Wolfe's blog offers several opportunities for authors & writers to feature their work: http://circleoffriendsbooks.blogspot.com
10) Chelle Cordero's blog has tons of great book reviews for authors: http://chellecordero.blogspot.com
11) Dallas Woodburn's Writing Life http://dallaswoodburn.blogspot.com
12) Hal Manogue's Short Sleeves Insights is for poetry lovers http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/
13) The Shift Guru http://shiftguru.wordpress.com Barbara Joye
14) Julie Achterhoff http://earthwalkr.wordpress.com
15) Sola Oluwande http://www.solamusings.blogspot.com/

Please click on each of their names in order to visit their blogs.

Take a Blog Jog With Me This Sunday

Blog Jog Day is tomorrow, Sunday (May 9). If you would like to take a jog around to read a few interesting blogs with me, just come back here and click on the link in tomorrow's post to get started. Each blog will have a link to the next blog on the route.

Subscribe to this blog so you don't forget. Thanks!