Not everyone can set up their own blog, you know.  Not everyone has the kind of time or skill available to exercise proper promotion techniques and get the word out.  For those kind of people, those people who are essentially writing purists, there is always the option of blogging for someone else.  And there are three good reasons for doing so, which is especially useful since we’ve been talking about that all week so far.

1. More resources. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do for money while you engage in promoting your blog and getting the adsense in play and getting other people to read the damn thing so you’re not shouting at an empty room.

2. Established (or establishing) audience. Again, the shouting at an empty room component of blogging is gone.  No more feeling like the crazy lady who talks to her cats all day!

3. Pure writing.  When you write someone else’s blog, your promotional duties become somewhat minimal.  You’re a content provider.  Oh, sure, you make up some contests or help out with Digg entries or something, to provide added value, but for the most part?  You WRITE. That’s it.

Take all these reasons together and you discover that blogging for someone else is a pretty good move.

I’m going to do something REALLY interesting for you today.  I’m going to change the entire way you’ve been playing the blog game, and I’m going to do it by giving you just one simple statement:

“If you act like you’re a big deal, people will think you are one.”

See, this is one of the most awesome statements you’ll ever come across.  And this is a great way to get a fire built under your blog, by acting like you’re a big deal.  See, here’s the really awesome thing.  You don’t have to be well known to convince people you’re famous.

Want proof?  That’s easy to provide.  The most watched show in the United States for the last five years is American Idol.  In fact, about twenty nine million people watched the show last week.  Sounds great, right?  Sure it does…until you remember two very important facts.

1. There are over three hundred fifty million people in the United States.

2. There are over six billion people on the face of the earth.

Ninety percent of America didn’t watch American Idol last week.  And on the world scale, a whopping 99.995 percent of the planet had something better to do.

You see how easy it is to be famous?  On the grander scale, almost no one’s heard of American Idol, and if they have, only vaguely.  You can take advantage of this same principle–if you act like you’re famous people will THINK you are.  After all, who would act like they were famous if they weren’t?

Okay, today we’re going to do something BUY MY BOOK ON AMAZON that’s a combination object lesson and general discussion point.  I know it sounds like it’s going to be a little complex, but if GO TO MY CAFEPRESS LINK you’ll bear with me I think you’ll find that it really is going to teach you something exciting.

You’re going to see that, as much BUY MY BOOK as you want to promote your books, or your merchandise, or what have you in your blog posts themselves, you’ll see that GREAT T-SHIRTS AND MUGS NOW AVAILABLE it’s not a good idea to do so.

Oh, sure–you’re thinking that a small link to the Amazon page or the Cafepress page or something similar can’t hurt.  And for the most part, BUY OFFICIALLY LICENSED STUFF you’re probably right.  But, if you’re going to go that route, GO TO THE STORE PAGE FOR MORE you have to be subtle about it.  There’s no choice.  Be understated.  If you put the links to your own merch, say, at the bottom of the post, or once at the top, you’ll get a lot more respect out of your readers than if you go for the hard sell right from the word go.

You’ve just seen exactly what I’m talking about.  The hard sell turns off the readers, as surely as it would if you did what I just did above.

Your readers know you have to eat, too. You’re here to provide them a service, which they hopefully esteem enough to keep going by supporting you.  But if you’re too focused on that support aspect, you’ll lose not only their support, but also the readers themselves.