Creating Your Own Blog Tour - Step One - Signing up Bloggers

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Today, I'm talking about how to create your own blog tour. This will be a series of posts that will include how to sign up bloggers (today), how to create your promo materials (including HTML posts), how to find reviewers, how to create a Thunderclap campaign, and how to throw a Facebook launch party. If you've ever wanted (or needed) to do some (or all) of the things yourself, strap in, grab a pen and a notebook, and let's get going!

In this series:
How to Sign up Bloggers
Creating Promotional Materials and HTML
Finding Reviewers
Creating a Thunderclap Campaign
Throwing a Facebook Launch Party

If you all remember my post a while back about blog tour companies, you'll know why I'm about to tell you how to set up your own. It takes a lot more work from you to do it yourself, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

To start off, you need to head over to The Paisley Reader and learn how to set up a Google Form. Yes, it's about pre-orders, but it all works the same way, so it's relevant.

Here's something to think about: What kind of blog tour do you want to do? Options include:

• Cover Reveals
• Book Reviews
• Promo Blast
• Release Day Blast
• Author Interviews
• Meet the Character(s)
• Excerpt Blast
• Combo of Above

There are also things you can offer the blog's followers to increase signups. Maybe you'd like to give away a copy of your book or a gift card (or both). Yes, those things matter on two fronts!

One: You offer something to the bloggers for agreeing to handle your content.
Two: You offer value to the readers of the blog(s) for checking out your stuff.

Remember the rule of a great giveaway: What does everyone need or want?

Go with that and your click rate will increase tenfold.

You need to start this process a good two weeks ahead of time unless you want reviews. If you're doing a review tour, you'll want to start a month out.

So, decide if you want to have an enticement, and go create your form now. Once you're done, come back and we'll go into where to post the signup link.

Questions that should be on your form:

• Name
• Blog or other URL where you plan to share
• E-mail address
• Date you can post/share (you usually have dates in mind, checkboxes matter here).
• PLAIN TEXT OR HTML. We'll get into why this matters in the next post. 

Ready? Let's continue.

Places to ask folks to sign up:

• Street Team - If you have a street team (those folks who tirelessly promote your books everywhere), you'll want to start there. After all, they're already fans of your work and have agreed to share.
• Facebook Author Groups - Chances are, you're a member of an author group where writers of your genre go to collaborate. Many authors have a blog, and many of them will be willing to share your content with a copy/paste option.
• Facebook Reader Groups - Again, chances are, you're a member of a reader group where readers of your genre hang out. With an incentive, they'll likely sign up, too!
• Goodreads Groups - Authors or readers, this is a great place to increase signups!

Good rule of thumb: Don't be annoying! Post once and leave it alone.

Plan to take responses for at least a week (include a weekend). Now, in your Drive, you'll have a "responses" document that'll give you the hot info! If you want, print it out once you're done signing people up and have turned the form off.

You're all set! Hold on to that piece of paper or document in Drive so you can follow along with the rest of the series. This is just the beginning, but once you do it a couple of times, you'll be an old hat.

What do you think? Helpful? Anything not in the lineup that you'd like to see added?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo