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Book Review & Contest Insights from Real Reviews and Submissions

What separates great books from the rest? Below are articles with insights from real reviews and contest submissions—what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve your book. You’ll also find a wide range of articles covering writing, publishing, marketing, and more. Each article has a Comments section so you can read advice from other authors and leave your own.

Why Some Books Win Awards (And Most Don’t) — Insights From Real Contest Submissions New!

What separates award-winning books from the rest? After evaluating contest submissions across a wide range of genres, certain patterns become clear. Some books consistently rise to the top. Others, even with strong ideas and clear effort behind them, fall short. The difference is rarely dramatic—it...

What We’ve Learned From Reviewing Hundreds of Thousands of Books (And Why Most Don’t Stand Out) New!

After reviewing and evaluating books across thousands of submissions over the past two decades, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. Some books immediately stand out to reviewers. Others—even well-intentioned ones—fade into the middle or fall short. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to...

Does Email Marketing Help Blogs?

You can use your email marketing tool in order to push your new blot posts out to your list automatically. After you publish a new post manually, don't forget to send an email broadcast to your list which includes a teaser sentence or two referring to your post. Make sure to include a link back to the blog post on your site. Take the whole blog post via an individual email to your list and then link back to the post at the end. Always send out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletters that include links to your best blog posts.

Set A Good FAQ

Be sure to create a collection of helpful answers to frequently asked questions and put them into an email auto responder series. Your auto responders include many links back to your foundation blog content. You can choose to create content categories which correspond with your auto responders and link to those categories. A good idea is to create editorial calendars for your blog and your email marketing campaigns that share common themes and work together. Your goal should be to publish a clear and understandable message for your readers which include all the tools in your content marketing toolbox.

Create Constant Commentary

Create newsletter to send to your readers which include links to your blog post. Add in news about any new products or services which have come out. Remind your readers that you have more information for them on your blog. When they land on your blog site provide them with a place to sign up for your newsletter. If you make it easy for them and they like what they see they'll pass the news on to others bringing more readers to your blog site.

Social Media Elements

Take the time to drive traffic from social networking platforms right back to the content on your blog and onto your email list. Make sure that you provide information on the social media sites not only about your blog site, but also about what you offer in the way of email marketing. You can maximize your profits by making your own network of followers and people to advertise to. Not only do you increase your profits, you also increase your awareness. You will find it's not hard to increase your revenue with well achieved social media. But always remember to send your followers to your website, rather than Facebook or social media, unless they are making you advertising money, such as AdSense.

Work With Several Elements

Combining email marketing and blogs can be a great way to get a much wider audience and drive more traffic to a blog which in turn promotes email marketing. Keep in mind that you can blog about your products or services and then put the links into newsletters and send them out to all of your readers by email. If you engage in email marketing you can make it relate to your blog and promote it. Once people are aware of the fact that they can get information about your email marketing on your blog site, then your blog site will also get a lot more traffic.