How authors blog successfully is supposed to be a mystery but I am about to give you Seth Godin’s secrets for beating the mystery.

I don’t know about you, but I find most author blogs instantly forgettable. All you need to do then, as an author, is not be instantly forgettable and you’ve already beaten most of the competition. This is how Seth Godin’s wisdom applies to author blogs and how you can rise to the top.

Who is Seth Godin?

If you have not heard of Seth Godin, he is an author and marketer. But not just any author. An international bestseller that changed the way business people think and act. Godin is the most influential business blogger in the world and consistently one of the twenty-five most widely read bloggers in the English language.

If you are an author struggling to get noticed, you need to pay attention to what this man is doing because he is winning. And what he does is surprisingly simple.

I would say that currently, something like 95% or more of author blogs do not implement anything that Seth Godin does. The first few authors that really get ahold of his techniques are going to blow the lid of their respective markets.

Are you ready?

How to get your ideas to spread

In the talk, below, Seth Godin explains that in order to be successful, you need the idea of you as an author to spread. When authors blog successfully it is because the idea of their blog spreads.

Step One: Be Interesting

The first step is to be remarkable. Be worth remarking upon.

You don’t need to be the best but you do need to be interesting and different in some way.

If your platform is that you just keep talking about your books, how are you any different to all the other authors? All you are doing is setting yourself for an author blog that fails.

Neil Gaiman’s blog is not an interesting author blog because he talks about his book, but because of the other things that he talks about.

Seth Godin almost never talks about his books. What he does is share ideas so interesting that people look for his books expecting to find more of the same (and they do).

Step Two: Make it spread

How do you make this happen?

Talk to people who are listening and maybe they will tell their friends.

There are three types of people when it comes to your blog. The few people with a passion for what you are talking about, the people who will never be interested, and everyone else. The mistake we usually make is trying to reach “everyone else”.

Instead, reach the people with a passion for your genre. Please them and they will go and tell the rest.

Seth Godin’s three rules for marketing.

In the video below Seth Godin presents three rules for marketing.

1. Design is free when you get to scale
2. The riskiest thing you can do now is to be safe
3. Simply being very good is the worst thing you can do

Watch the TED Talk that he gave and ask yourself this: How can I apply that to my author blog? Your answer will help you become an example of authors that blog successfully.

Read Seth Godin’s books

I strongly suggest that you put your hands on at least one Seth Godin book as soon as possible. Here are three suggestions. Any single one of these will be a sound investment of your time.

• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
• All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–And Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All
• Small is the New Big: And 183 Other Riffs, Rants and Remarkable Business Ideas

Whatever else you do today, be remarkable. That’s how authors blog successfully.

Image Credit: By Yaffa (Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons