Why I Love Blogger Pages!

Today I maximized the benefits of Blogger Pages. One of the best ways to promote an author, a book or a blog is to keep the related websites up to date. This requires time. This time can take away from other types of promoting, but it has to be done.

It's important that as many questions as possible can be answered on your website.

Blogger allows me to post Pages to my blog. These appear as tabs just under the title and description of my blog. I can add up to 20 pages!

These pages are amazing to add text and photos to your blog that will not fit in the sidebar. These are the tabs I already had:

• Submissions: guidelines for guest posters
• About the Author: my biography
• The Pet Washer: information about my book
• Cast of Characters: bios for the main characters in my Pet Washer book
• About the Artist: the bio on Salina Shelton who draws my cover art

Today I cleaned up my Pages and added new ones. I removed the Cast of Characters and About the Artist and added them to the website dedicated to The Pet Washer Series. This blog isn't for my young Pet Washer fans--it's a resource center for book marketing and promoting myself as a professional author. Just because I have 20 pages available doesn't mean I need to use them all! I decided to get out the hatchet and remove pages that weren't relevant to marketing or my profession.

The Pet Washer tab remains and includes a link to my Pet Washer Series website where readers can learn more about the book and the people behind it. It would be silly for me not to include a link to the product which inspired this blog to begin with! 

Next I updated the remaining Pages and added new ones:

• I renamed "About the Author" simply "Jennifer". 

Then I added:

• Advertise Here: a page for sponsors and paid advertisers to contact me for rates and information.
• About This Blog: a page which explains the goal and mission statement for The Jennifer (Author) Diaries
• Events: a page which lists my speaking engagements and signings.
• News: a page to display when I've made the news
• Interviews: a page where I will link to my author interviews on the web
• Guest Writers: a page where I feature the bios and articles of guest posters. 

I love the Pages feature because it doesn't muddy the home page of my blog and it allows me to provide loads of additional content for anyone interested! It shouldn't be hard to contact me, learn about me, view my product, submit an article to me, advertise with me or get to know me. If it's hard, I'm not promoting, I'm hiding!

To Do: Have an acquaintance peruse your blog and watch them do it without speaking or hinting at where to go. When they are done, ask them for comments. What was missing? What did they want to see more of? Could they easily figure out how to contact you and what your blog is about?

We know everything there is to know about ourselves and our websites--are your readers missing the boat? Ask them! And then give them what they want.

(Click here for an article on how to add Pages to your Blogger blog!)

Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Author of The Pet Washer
a novel for girls aged 9-12