How to promote a literary blog?

I think people might be interested in finding book reviews from those authors, even if they don't search for the author specifically.

Are you sure you did your keyword research properly? Try to find some competitors that do well in your niche and check out their keywords as well.

What are your credentials? (I mean both degrees, publications and effort and time you put into studying your subject matter).


Who do you want to see your blog post?

Students?
Scholars?
College professors?
The general, educated inquisitive but not an academic public?

It matters.

Because they live in different spaces.

How is your blog different from or like the Contemporary French and Francophone Studies or the Yale Journal of Criticism or Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and History of Ideas?

I mean in every aspect but peer-reviewed.

Is it more like Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog?

Either way, I think, except for students doing some essay for French 302, most people do not search by Proust or Mann.

They'd search more by theme or keywords related to French novels, 20th century French lit.

Writers might search by Proust or a theme from Proust... Again, not many...

Most people interested would come to your blog if you're referred on a site / in a book / article they visit /read.

Which brings me to:
are you at Popova's level?

Then make friends with Krista Tippin and such people, get yourself invited on their podcasts.

Do you have a university degree? Does that university allow former students to run blogs on their platform? Indirect but useful, long range.

Get yourself mentioned on related blogs... Commenting is what most people suggest. I prefer guest author or interviewed author.

If you're counting on SEO...
did you hear about long tail keywords?
Probably all of them are that (even the main one, based on search volume compared to say, red running shoes or dog collars.

What you might not know is that if Google says traffic is between 0-10, you get traffic, if you're #1 for that keyword.

correcting Scott Moncrieff's own misreadings
will get you no searchers,

But Swan's way has a few. so does Proust's Verdurin, and all the tiles of the volumes do.

And there's tens of thousands of searches for his name and at least a thousand for In Search of Time Lost.

The ones that have 10-100 are keywords to go for. (If you are in active mode, like you're about to launch an Adwords campaign, Google will show you the exact number... so you can work with the keywords at the higher end, if they're not competitive.... Competitive has nothing with the competition number Google keyword planner gives. That's for AdWords only.)

If you rank for a few of those, and a few for Mann and a few for other writers, you end up with decent traffic.

Since you launched your blog, do yourself a favor and put your page urls and the main url in Google keyword planner tool, like you're looking to get keyword ideas...

You'll see what Google thinks your pages are about... You find a good keyword, add it to your list. Also, make a page for it.

I put Popova's "Meditations on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp: Polish Painter Józef Czapski on Literature, Survival, and the Human Soul" in Google's keywrod planner website search. These are the top 12 results
marcel proust

proust
in search of lost time \
proust questionnaire

marcel proust in search of lost time

marcel proust books

swann's way

really good books

books on love story

books for kids

proust in search of lost time

madeleine cake

Further down the list, you find a lot of keywords related to 'books for inmates"

Lots of keywords with at least 10 searches a month and no competition.

The same is true for your pages.

Also, you might want to look facebook groups for the authors you write about. Proust has a bunch of them, most with next to no members, a couple have several hundreds and one has 4 thousand.

Join those group, participate, and every now and again, mention your blog... not too often, you don't want to spam.

By the way, if you're doing book reviews and they are published, can you get your blog mentioned in your bio?


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