I've been thinking a lot about all the advice we're given for optimizing ourselves on Facebook, our blog, and all those other sites: Pinterest, Muttonline, Twitter, well, you get the idea. I'm supposed to define my mission, which I'm told is not to market my books, but rather to intrigue, inform, inspire and entertain without ever saying to the reader: Have I got a book for you. I know you'll like it cause I've been on your website and/or your blog and see what you are interested in. This is today considered spamming. Okay, that's too "in your face," so I'm working on something. I tried uploading a few blogs about the historical stories I've unearthed during researching my books. So far, people don't seem all that interested, though I've had a few comments. Mostly from people who already read my works.

I realize I need something that will attract a core of new readers to my work. They're out there somewhere, but it's hard to know where. Lately I've changed my blog's focus from aiming at writers to aiming at readers. (Does this mean writers don't read?) No, of course not, it only means writers who know lots of writers can only afford to buy so many books.

Back to my mission. Hey, that would be one of the keywords I should use for this blog. Or not. I'm not sure if keywords have to be subjects that everyone recognizes or stuff like mission, create, research. I don't think these words are particularly zingy. They're even dull, in fact. So let's try keywords first, then write a blog using a few? Afraid I'd end up with something less than readable. Using keywords that people are using to search for my type, style, genre, is important, if I could only pin down what they are.

I'm told to bold subtitles, add bullets followed by a list of facts. To me, this would get old fast. Since I'm a reader of fiction, I don't want to read stuff written like it would be for a college English class, or perhaps history. Let's see:

KEYWORDS

• Western Romance • Historical Romance • Cheyenne • Cherokee • Western Women Okay, does that interest any of you? Does that tell you much about my work? It might, but it seems a dull way to do it to me. I'd rather write about a western woman I knew of, one who courageously headed west with a goal in mind, something she felt so passionate about that an entire book could be written about her. Then you might be more likely to say, hey, I liked that, maybe I'd like to read one of her books. To me, that's what blogging is all about. Bulleted lists are too schoolified for me. So what do you think? Let me know what sort of blogs you truly enjoy.