Day 5: Keeping it real,
fresh, and fun
Day 1 was a total blast for me with Introductions.
Day 2 was about Blog Development
Day 3 was also giveaway day – don’t miss my post, I have 4 books for grab!
Day 4 was about Ethics in Blogging
day 5 is also about Picture Books to YA
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Day 5 question is:
“Today, we’re interested in knowing how you address that question, especially if you’ve been doing this for a while. If you have been around for years, how do you keep your material fresh? How do you continue to keep blogging fun? How do you not only grow an audience, but how do you keep them coming back for more? Think about it, post about it, link to it, and read about how other bloggers are keeping it real, fresh, and fun. Maybe we can inspire each other today!
New projects, redesigns, collaboratives–what do you do to keep blogging fresh for you? Post about your ideas and experiences, link up, and find inspiration in what other bloggers are doing!”
The mere fact of adding new reviews, especially of recent or brand new books keeps my material fresh, hopefully. I also try to improve my reviews and make them more personal and detailed.
Fun? Yes, it is always fun to share about my books, and interact with awesome other book bloggers through comments.
I try to keep my readers coming by:
- organizing giveaways, [one is coming on June 4th!
- and encouraging them to subscribe through emails when entering those giveaways
- adding new features, such as I Love France meme and the Books on France Reading Challenge, including incentives for those who participate
- encouraging my readers to review books featured on France Book Tours, with great incentives [book of the month giveaway or a $15 gift card of their choice, and their book blog featured all month long]. [links give here send you to the current giveaway and winner]
- building the book blogging community by actively participating in numerous reading challenges, a few weekly memes
- tweeting, retweeting, facebooking, and pinteresting. I wish I could automatically connect my posts to Google +. If you know how to do this, please share your secret!
- with the very recent launching of France Book Tours, I do not have any big new project in mind
- I am currently happy with my blog design, though I would love to use larger fonts without too much html work. I recently added a flag widget, just for fun
I’ve only relatively recently started participating in book tours (generally through TLC), but so far I’ve had excellent luck with them. I like looking at all of the reviews that people post, because everyone tends to react differently. 🙂
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TLC are great, also Historical fiction virtual book tours if you are into HF. I also like http://www.virtualauthorbooktours.com/. have you checked my France Book Tours? exclusively about books having some type of connection with France: http://francebooktours.com/
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I did sign up for the historical fiction blog tours. Those look interesting. Looking at the France ones now. 🙂
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i often just simply cannot resist books for the HF book tours!
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I’m still reasonably new (a year at the end of July) so I’m still working at all of those things – giveaways, new authors, lots of books – all that. And I’m contemplating a redesign now.. I just need to decide exactly what I want.
*sigh*
adding on touring to open the availability to different authors / genres / books helped a ton – just did another round after moving away from nearly all touring since so many just weren’t offering things that interested me… and I was getting so busy with direct request reads…
I’ve tried a ton of different “auto share” options – right now – this g+ post has a couple that I’m looking at
https://plus.google.com/106393478695568433143/posts/Hhc2Pv9AzKL
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thanks for sharing. what I’m looking for, but not sure it exists, is too have my blog post automatically sent to my Google + wall [not the reverse], just as I do it for twitter and facebook. I use wordpress.com so far have not found how to do that
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Another excellent post, Emma. And you have some very unique content. Up until now, I have hoped that my reviews would just draw people in, especially when I started reviewing popular books, but it has become clear from today’s posts that I have quite a lot to learn still. I will keep watching everyone and seeing what I can do to improve my content. Thanks for posting.
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thanks. by unique, I assume you are referring to my French features. you know, they developed by themselves, over time, and it takes time [going to celebrate my 3rd year in 3 in 3 months].
i would say really read what YOU want to read. if you talk excitedly about books YOU love, readers will come. just left a rather long comment on your post, i hope it does not sound too much like coming from mother hen!! 😦
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Yes, I was referring to the French features. I have never seen anything like that anywhere else.
And I think reading what I want is … Part of the problem. I have yet to find a genre a don’t enjoy.
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that’s good, no risk of getting bored, not knowing what to read, lol
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LOL Exactly.
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