If you have a launch coming up, or simply want to get together with a few of your favorite bloggers to build your community, a blog tour might just be your new favorite way of collaborating.
Having hosted my own blog tour for my personal development site, Becoming Who You Are, and taken part in several as a blogger, I find them to be a win-win way to share my work with a wider audience, plus a super fun way of cross-promoting with other fab bloggers out there.
In this post, I’ll share the basics of what a blog tour is, plus a few best practices you can use to make your blog tour as successful as possible.
How does a blog tour work?
In its simplest form, a blog tour works as follows: you, the host, decide on a theme and time period for your blog tour, and reach out to fellow bloggers asking if they’d like to take part. On a pre-agreed date, they publish a post about that topic on their blog, including a small text snippet about the tour (plus any relevant links), and you share all posts on your site as they’re released.
Tips for hosting a successful blog tour
Blog tours are fairly simple to set up, but they do require organization and planning. Here are a few best practices you can use to ensure your blog tour runs as smoothly as possible:
1. Get clear on the details
There are two questions to ask yourself at the start:
1 - “What is the purpose of this blog tour?”
2 - “What is my metric for success?”
Do you have a product or service you want to promote? Who are your ideal clients for that product or service? What is your ideal outcome for the blog tour, and what metrics will you use to measure that? Your answers to these questions will influence the topic of your tour, who you invite to take part (you’ll want to invite people whose communities will be interested in what you’re offering), the call to action you provide, and where you link to on your website, so it’s important to get clear on these points from the beginning.
Once you have the foundation for your blog tour, it’s time to decide practical details like duration (most blog tours are a week or less, however some big launch-related tours can last as long as a month), how the bloggers will notify you of their posts, and how you’ll go about posting them on your site (individually; in a daily roundup, etc.).
2. Plan in advance
Many bloggers plan and schedule content weeks, sometimes months, in advance and won’t necessarily be able to accommodate an additional post at short notice.
Inviting people at least a month in advance will increase the likelihood that they’ll be able to take part without it being a last-minute stress. It also frees up more time for you to spend on sharing and promotion closer to the event.
3. Make it as easy as possible for participants to contribute and share
With your cadre of bloggers on board, the fun really begins.
As a blog tour host, you want to make it as a easy as possible for your participants to take part and share. This starts with giving them all the relevant information they need from the beginning. This might include:
- The date you’d like them to publish (or a calendar where they can easily snag a date if they’re exclusive)
- Any graphics or links you’d like to include (I created a text snippet bloggers could copy and paste, which you can see below)
- Pre-written tweets they can use to share their post when it’s live
Here is the initial email I sent out to potential participants:
“Hi X,
I hope you're well! I've been a huge fan of your blog for a while and so appreciate all the goodness you've been putting out into the world. I run a site called Becoming Who You Are, where I teach people how to be kind to themselves, and I'm reaching out to invite you to take part in a blog tour I'm putting together later this month.
The Thriving Blog Tour will run from 24th to 31st March. The theme of the tour (as you might be able to tell... :)) is thriving. I'd be so honoured if you'd be willing to take part, share your insights around this topic, and help me spread the word about self-kindness as widely as possible.
The Blog Tour will be celebrating the start of my upcoming course, From Coping to Thriving, and, on a broader level, I hope it will get people thinking about where in their lives they might be settling for coping and could use a little more self-care.
I'll be posting a link to each post on my site and sharing them far and wide on social media. I'll also be compiling the posts into an ebook at the end of the blog tour (working title: The Little Book of Thriving) and you'll be free to distribute this to your audience as you wish.
I have some topic suggestions and pre-prepared tweets ready for you to share but I want to be respectful of your time so I'll keep this as brief as possible for now.
If you're interested in taking part in the tour, please send me a quick email back, and I'll get the relevant info to you ASAP. If it's not a good fit for you right now, no worries at all and thanks for taking the time to read this 🙂
Thank you for all the great work you do!”
Once a blogger responded in the affirmative, I sent them the following info:
“Here is some additional info about the tour:
1. Timing
Would you be willing to post on {insert specific date}? Let me know if this isn't going to work, otherwise I'll assume you're good to go on this date.
2. Topics
Here are some potential topics for you to choose from:
My story of shifting from coping to thriving
My biggest self-care mistake, and how I came back from it
What self-care means to me
How I changed [X] habit (and why I'm happier as a result)
5 lessons I've learned about thriving in life
And, of course, if you have a topic in mind, please feel free to go for it! 🙂
3. Decoration
To show you're part of the Thriving Blog Tour, please add the italicised text below to the top of your post and/or use one of the graphics I've attached to this email (feel free to adapt the text to fit your own voice).
"From Coping to Thriving is a six-week journey that will teach you how to turn your coping strategies into self-caring behaviours, leaving behind struggle and learning to thrive. This post is part of the Thriving Blog Tour, which is spreading self-kindness to the masses. To learn more and join us, click here."
4. Sharing
As I mentioned in my first email, the aim of this Blog Tour is to spread the word about self-kindness to as many people as possible. Feel free to share your post widely around social media and I'll do the same.
Here are a few pre-written tweets to get you started:
I'm writing about self-kindness for the Thriving Blog Tour with @becomewhour [http://linktoyourbloghere.com]
Want to learn how to shift from coping to thriving? Check out my post for @becomewhour's Thriving Blog Tour[http://linktoyourbloghere.com]
Do you have habits you want to change? Read about what helped me in my post for @becomewhour's Thriving Blog Tour[http://linktoyourbloghere.com]
5. Thank you!
Thanks for participating in the Thriving Blog Tour! I know it's going to be a ton of fun and a way to spread a valuable message. I am running an affiliate program for the course so let me know if you'd like to join and I'll send you the details.
Please email the link to your post and your Twitter handle the day your post goes live so I can share it and add it to the Thriving Blog Tour webpage.
If you have any questions about any of the above, or anything else to do with the tour, feel free to get in touch :)”
I also sent a follow-up email a couple of days before their post was due to go live, reminding them to email me a link to their post so I could share it.
4. Provide clear CTAs
Just as you want to make it as easy as possible for the bloggers to take part, you also want to make it as easy as possible for their community to find and follow you, which means you need to create a clear call to action.
When you first started thinking about your blog tour, you’ll have identified your ideal outcome—the action you want people to take as a result of reading a blog tour post. This might be subscribing to your mailing list, signing up to hear more about a particular service or product, or even purchasing the service or product you’re promoting. Provide your bloggers with a snippet of text they can include with their post that asks people to do that as clearly as possible.
For example, when I hosted my blog tour, my aim was to encourage readers to visit the registration page for my course so they could learn more and, if it was a good fit, sign up. As you can see from the email above, I asked bloggers to include a specific snippet of text that encouraged people to do this.
5. Be a gracious host
This goes without saying, but coming out of a whirlwind blog tour and launch, it can fall by the wayside. Say thank you to everyone involved in the tour after it’s over. Share a couple of stats with them, like how many people were spreading the word and educating people about your chosen topic or any positive feedback you received so they can see the impact of the collective project.
6. Accommodate post-tour traffic
Just because the blog tour is officially over doesn’t mean that people aren’t still going to be finding your site through the different tour posts. Even if you were running a time-sensitive launch that ends shortly after your blog tour, include an opt-in form on the page where latecomers can register to hear more the next time you open for registration.
Blog Tours Done Right
- Busting the Overnight Success Myth Community Blog Tour
- The Jump Tour
- The Skinny Dip Society Blog Tour
As you’ll see from the examples above, blog tours come in all shapes and sizes so don’t be afraid to put your own stamp on your tour! Done right, blog tours are a fabulous way of spreading the word about a new book, course, or event and connecting with similar-minded bloggers and business owners in the process. Although they do take some organization, hosting your own blog tour is a great chance to build relationships, grow your audience and have fun in the process.
Have you run a blog tour, or contributed to one? What are your best practice tips? Leave a comment and let us know. And stay tuned for The Road to Solopreneur Success blog tour, starting Monday, September 14th to promote One Woman Shop’s limited-time Solopreneur Success Bundle!
Latest posts by Hannah Braime (see all)
- The Ultimate Guide to a Successful Blog Tour - September 10, 2015
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