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This is the second post in my Book Blog for Beginners Series!

Here are links to the other posts that are up now (these links will be updated as I post more in the series!)

• Why You Should Start a Book Blog
• Free Resources for Book Bloggers
• Can You Get Paid for Book Reviews?
• How to Get Your Book Blog Noticed by the Algorithms (SEO, Data Analytics)
• How to Get Your Blog Noticed on Social Media

Free Resources for Book Bloggers!

If you’re just starting out as a blogger and you are looking for some fantastic resources, you can’t go wrong reading advice from other bloggers. I have compiled a list of 21 blog posts to get you started on your blogging journey!

Resources for Getting Your Blog Setup

1. If you’re looking for a great guide for setting up your website, WebsiteSetup has an extensive guide to help you get started.
2. This post from On Book Street covers all the basics of starting a book blog, including how to set up your domain name, choosing a host, and picking between the many blogging platforms.
3. When you set up your blog on WordPress, you can get a free plugin called “Yoast SEO” that helps you create content that actually shows up in search engines. I didn’t get this until recently and it’s made a huge difference.
4. You can also get a Grammarly plug-in for free into your browser. I use Google Chrome and I love it for checking things on WordPress, social media, and emails. I don’t love it inside of Google Docs because it tends to make things crash hard, but they are still in beta with configuring it for Docs. I don’t do a lot of writing in Docs though, since I’m a dedicated Microsoft Word kinda gal, but if you do then you will want to pause your Grammarly plug-in for longer documents. It can seamlessly grammar check your blog posts in WordPress though and helps if you have little errors like double words (sometimes I will write “the” twice in a sentence and not notice!) that other grammar checks miss.
5. If you’re ever worried that you might run out of post ideas, you can PIN this post from Uncorked Librarian with tons of blog post ideas. It’s helpful to keep a list like this on hand when planning out your content!
6. Speaking of Uncorked Librarian, she has a great post on how to use Affiliate Marketing as a book blogger. One of the affiliates that she mentions is Share a Sale, which I also use, and I decided to use it because of her post! So, check it out 🙂
7. If you’re new to email lists, this post might help you out. Now, I don’t love this blog because it’s like a lot of pop-ups. But the information is still good enough to be worth a mention here, so you can find the post here.
8. Back in November 2020, I chatted with Cielo Bellerose about her experience as a book blogger. It was a great interview and we got into the different ways that you might go about getting paid to be a book blogger. I suggest checking it out if you’re interested in that!

Resources for Writing Posts on Your Book Blog

1. This post from What’s Hot Blog covers how to write negative book reviews, so if you’re worried about how to tackle that, you can check it out here!
2. I shared a post back in January about how I write blog posts quickly without sacrificing quality. It can be so hard to create a lot of content, so if you want a simple guide to making a lot of it without sacrificing your whole life for it, check out that post here.
3. If you are looking for reputable sites that give out ARC (advanced reader copies), Behind That Story shared a post with some great links and descriptions about which sites actually deliver on great ARCs. Click here to read the post on Behind That Story!
4. I also talk about how to get free books from publishers. This is a post that I wrote back when I was the one reaching out to book bloggers and offering them ARCs for the small press I used to work for! So if you’re interested in that, you can find that post here.
5. If you want to try and make a post go viral, this blog post from This Rising Damsel covers that. I don’t know that this is a sure-fire way to make it “viral” but it does help you create content that people can actually find! There’s nothing worse than putting a post up there that more or less disappears into the content churn.
6. This post from The Book Family Rogerson covers 40 book blogging goals to motivate you to succeed. I found this post helpful as a resource when I was feeling frustrated with creating more book content. I wanted to reach my book blog goals, but it’s hard when you’re putting out all of this stuff and no one really cares. This post really helped me through that slump, so go check it out!
7. This is a great post from Broke by Books on how to write a book review.
8. Kaya Burgin shares her take on writing book reviews here, and also has a template that you can download. Templates are especially helpful for new bloggers!
9. Here are even more book blog post ideas from Wonderfully Bookish. Check those out here!

Resources for Marketing & Social Media as a Book Blogger

1. This post covers the different hashtags for Instagram. I’m not on Instagram, but I know it’s huge with the book blogging community, so you check that out here, if you’re thinking of starting your own #bookstagram.
2. This is a guide to editing #Bookstagram photos for Instagram from Eye Heart Romance.
3. And even more #bookstagram guides for beginners from Written by Charlotte.
4. If you’re interested in Tailwind, you can learn all about it on Blogging Enthusiast. I don’t use this program myself, so I can’t speak to that, but I know a lot of people have a lot of success with it!
5. In an older post, I talked about 5 simple ways to improve your email list.