Setting up a free online blog is a great way to not only promote your books but build your brand as an author. Many popular authors have set up their own blogs where they can not only post samples of their work, but also posts on topics of interest to their readers. You can even use the blog to interact with your readers by, for example, asking them to contribute suggestions for titles for upcoming books or even names of characters. And unlike personal websites, blogs are easier to set up and maintain, requiring no particular technical knowledge on the part of the author.
The first step in setting up a free online blog is to choose a blog platform. Most authors who are new to blogging usually start out with hosted blogging platforms such as WordPress in which the blog is hosted on their domain with the URL being a combination of your blog name and their own address, i.e. authorblog.wordpress.com. Apart from being free, the main advantage of using these hosted services is that it is very easy to set up the blog and add new posts as the site itself will guide you through the process. Of course, these free solutions have many limitations regarding configurability and design, since you are limited to the templates offered by the site, but you can eventually move up to self-hosted blogging when you have more experience and can afford to pay the hosting and domain name fees.
Once you’ve set up your blog, the secret to successful blogging is to regularly update the site with unique and interesting posts that will give visitors a reason to constantly return to your site. If you can spare the time to update your blog daily then you should do so, but otherwise once or twice a week will be enough to maintain readers’ interest. Make sure that you write about subjects that you feel passionate about and that you feel your readers would enjoy and find useful. This passion will make visitors look forward to reading new posts on your free online blog and help build a steady readership.
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