Blog Critique: Julie Hedlund

In this series I give constructive feedback about the look and function of an author blog from a marketing perspective. As always, I rely on help from graphic designers Tom Barnes (my hubby) and Joe LaRue. To review the blog elements we look at or to submit your own blog for critique, go here.

Today begins 5 days of blog critiquing awesomeness. Are you ready for it? We're starting off with a bang with the amazing pre-published author Julie Hedlund. Check out her blog real quick and come back to see what we're gonna chat about today.

Okay, Julie's blog is pretty much perfect.  She has a great title, it's beautifully laid out, easy to read, easy on the eyes, organized very well, and so on and so on. Take special note on how she handles her blog roll -even though she has a lot of names, they are very cleanly listed and don't seem cluttered at all. (My only grievance is that I didn't find my name listed among them... :) 

Anyway, I'm breezing through this part because this isn't what we're going to talk about in regards to Julie's blog. What we are going to talk about is that little box that says "Vote For My Story!" See, last week when I stopped by her blog, I noticed Julie was in the middle of a MeeGenius Author challenge. She entered a contest with MeeGenius that required her to do some of her own promoting and getting people to vote for her picture book. Problem was, she wasn't promoting her story very much. That vote for my story box wasn't there. I'm not saying she was doing nothing - she was tweeting and encouraging people to vote through a few mentions on her blog - but I sensed she needed a bit more of a push. So with only a week left for gathering votes, I decided to give Julie some ideas to get the word out about her book. Hopefully the tips I gave her are also helpful to all of you whether promoting for a contest or a newly released published book. Here's the highlights of what I told Julie last week:

1. Run a contest on your blog. The winner will get something cool.  To enter to win, readers must tweet, facebook or blog about your book entry at MeeGenius. They must include a link to your entry to be counted as an entry. They get one chance to win with each that they do. Have them put in the comments links to where they facebooked, blogged, or tweeted about your book. 
2. Set up a mini-blog tour. Yes, it's short notice, but you could tweet or blog out a call for anyone who might want to help.  Be sure to post a schedule of your blog tour. .
3. If you don't get enough bites on the blog tour, you could offer to do joint promotion with one of the other entry winners. Now this sounds devious, but pick someone who doesn't have a lot of votes. You don't want to help out someone who is already winning! Anyway, contact the author and ask if they would like to write a post on your blog about their book in exchange for you writing a post on their blog about your book. It seems like you are shooting yourself in the foot, but it actually is a great way to reach out to your fellow authors and show support. I believe in author karma and this will get you a ton of it. 
4. Make sure you get optimum traffic to your blog this next week, whatever methods of promoting you decide to do there, by commenting on lots of other blogs. Look at all your followers and try to leave meaningful comments on all of their blogs. A lot of bloggers will visit you because you have recently visited them. The more comments you leave on other blogs, the more likely it is they will visit you. 
5. You need a button/badge in your sidebar near the top directing people to your entry. Don't make them read your posts to find out about your book

As you may have noticed, Julie's already implemented many of those ideas. Consider sharing her link and entering her contest. And then, I urge you to check out her story at MeeGenius, not only to vote, but also to keep track of her votes. This is sort of like an experiment for all of us. I'm very excited to see how it works out for her. As I type this, she has 206 votes and is ranked at 45. The first round voting ends Dec. 18th. The first round finalists are chosen by an unknown combination of votes and MeeGenius staff. If Julie makes the first round, her story will be professionally edited, illustrated and animated and reposted for the finals in March. LET'S GET JULIE TO THE FINALS AND DISCOVER THE POWER OF ONLINE MARKETING.

What do you say? Do you have any ideas to help Julie? Please share!