It’s been a bit since I updated you all on Angela’s book campaign. As some of you may have been reading in the News From The Home Office column on WritersWeekly.com, I’m going through a mystery illness right now and it has put the kibosh on my promotional activities.

But I’m feeling fine. So I decided to get back on the horse and continue with the promotional campaign for Angela’s book.

In the last installment, I said this time I’d get into the inner workings of Feedburner, a great service for maximizing the RSS feed of a blog. But the subject is a bit complicated, so I thought I’d instead tackle something a little more straightforward for this installment - listing a blog with all the blog-specific directories and search engines.

One of the reasons I recommend blogs to authors is because there are many directories and search engines specifically for blogs. And, by definition, you can’t list standard web sites in them. So the fact of just having a blog, rather than a standard web site, increases the number of venues for exposure.

Registering with the blog directories and search engines really isn’t that much different than registering a standard web site. You need these pieces of information:

+ your email address (use one that you don’t mind giving out to the public)

+ your blog URL

+ 20-word description of the blog (not necessary for every site you submit to, but asked for by some)

+ Keyword phrases describing the blog

Remember, this is for the blog, not the book. So the above information should be relevant to the blog.

In Angela’s case, the relevant info is:

+ richard@booklocker.com

+ http://vbac.angelahoy.com/

+ A diary of one expecting family’s struggle over the local medical community’s refusal to perform VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

+ vbac, vaginal birth after cesarean, cesarean section, c-section

Some blog directories and search engines ask for more extensive personal information, like your name, age, gender, or physical location. The reason they ask for that is to be able to present the search results in more interesting ways (all the blogs in Bangor, Maine, for example). My personal feeling is if you aren’t comfortable giving it out, don’t. If they require information you don’t want to give out, skip the site and go to the next one.

Also, some of these sites require you create a free account with them, and provide a link to them from your blog.

Here is the master list I keep for BookLocker authors. I built this list over time from various sources:

http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
http://globeofblogs.com/register.php
http://www.getblogs.com/lma/guidelines.html
http://www.blogrankings.com/addblog.php
http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://www.bloggernity.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://swoogle.umbc.edu/index.php?option=com_swoogle_service&service=submit
http://www.blurtit.com/
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
http://www.blogoriffic.com/add_blog.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
http://www.wilsdomain.com/add-url.html
http://www.yourwebloghere.com/add_url.php
http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php
http://www.blogtopsites.com/register
http://www.thevital.net/
http://www.blogion.com/?p=submit
http://www.photarium.com/add-site.php
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
http://www.blogbib.com/submit.php
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
http://www.bulletize.com/submit.php
http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
http://www.lsblogs.com/howtosubmit.php

I try to keep this list current, but bad links still pop up. If you run across a bad link, let me know.