Good point. You can’t base your entire marketing strategy on what works for someone else. Your market is not exactly the same as theirs. Your strengths are not exactly the same as theirs. You need to find the right balance, and it’s okay not to follow every bit of advice or someone else’s marketing plan play-by-play.

In my case the goal of the virtual blog tour is to bring more readers to this blog, promote my new indie publishing blog, and when appropriate to promote my social media blog. It’s going to be tough to say exactly how much traffic comes from the original articles since I’m trying to be an active commenter as well during the launch month. I can already see traffic coming from the KeyboardHussy blog to the new indie publishing site for example, a combination of the guest post and my comments in general on that blog where I include a link to the indie publishing blog.

One thing I’m already noticing overall is that links from Twitter followers are up — either links from the articles or RTs when I tweet about the guest posts. So that’s nice. I’m also seeing some fresh faces here in the comments already this month. I’m just not sure if it’s a case of previous lurkers suddenly finding something they want to comment on or new readers from the exposure on other sites.

Another goal of a blog tour is to build relevant links to your content. That can help your search engine rankings in the long haul — although you might not see results for a few months. Also, that content is archived and then indexed in search engines on the hosts’ sites too. That means those links are potentially long-term traffic sources, and highly targeted ones at that.

I’ve run shorter, but similar, tours in the past. They’ve generally proven to lead to short-term traffic surges and then a few long-term relationships with new regular readers or better relationships with the people who hosted the blog posts. And that networking aspect can lead to gigs when we keep each other in mind for referrals. For me that’s not a priority goal, and I probably wouldn’t recommend a blog tour for that specific reason, but it can happen. If you wanted to use a blog tour for direct gigs I would suggest handling the bio more like you would in article marketing — include a direct call to action and include only a single link that directs people to your business site. Once you get them to your landing page your copy there can convert them into buyers.

I actually am pretty effective (although I don’t do this often) and getting new clients if I send potential clients an email letter of introduction. However, I’m far happier with the results I get from linkedin. For me, I’m pretty passive about it (just put up a profile), but I get the type of clients that I want.

I’d like to try something else that lands me the kind of client that I’m looking for and obviously I don’t and haven’t experimented with many marketing techniques. So I think that I’m finally going to finally give this blogging thing a try. I’ve been curious about it for a while, what do I have to lose? I can also peck away at it during those down times (like now, when I’m waiting for the next version from a client…) Maybe I can learn something new along the way.

Can you let us know how your virtual blog tour goes (as in, if you end up with new cilents, readers, or whatever the goal is). I’m curious as to how effective new strategies are, although I’m sure it differs from person to person.