Authors need to have their professional-looking and mobile-friendly website. This is one of the most crucial parts of a book marketing strategy. An author’s website is the right place for you to showcase your creativity without being restricted by other bookselling sites. You can build relationships with your audience and readers can visit it at their convenience. The site acts as a portal into your world and you can also benefit when it comes to publishing your books.
Ideally, websites for authors need to be a combination of a personal website, a resume website, a gallery, and a portfolio website. Today, most authors are creating their custom websites, so this helps them to market their books. But you need to drive traffic to your website so that you can increase sales of your book. This article discusses how to increase traffic to your author website.
Author website explained
The good thing about having an author website is that you can have total control over the site’s content, meaning that you can put almost anything you want on it. Most people tend to hire a web developer before they figure out the purpose for creating a website. A good author website needs to have your bio, book information, and many more.
Keep in mind that you have to communicate with your potential readers. Therefore, you need to have a mailing list as well as a sign up form and connect your website to your social networking accounts.
Regardless of the way you want to use your site, you should note that few web developers understand the key marketing strategies, especially when it comes to book marketing. Therefore, you need to check the portfolio of a developer before you decide to hire them. A good web developer should have enough experience with book and author sites. A book website is different because they are content and text-heavy compared to other sites, such as restaurant or photography websites which usually have a lot of graphics.
Driving traffic to your website
When you have a website that functions well for your book, you need to get your potential readers to visit it. Your author website should work as an online hub that can help you to showcase your latest published books, offer links to buy your book, update your audience on the next public engagement, and many more.
You need to ensure that you post a link to the site on your social media platforms. Some authors usually have their social media platforms utilizing a single social media managing site. In this way, you can easily post site links as well as information on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Also, you can have social media icon buttons on your site to build your audience and cross-promote your book.
It’s crucial to have social media posts that feature links to the author in front of most of your audience. The best way you can do this is by utilizing hashtags in your Twitter and Instagram posts. You should note that hashtags can group together your posts with a common subject to make it easier for your audience to find the information they are searching for.
Hashtags can be genre specific like #SciFi and #RomanceWriter. For example, if you have a romance book that is ready, then you can tweet to your target audience to alert them about your book. But you need to make sure that you include a link to your site and the hashtag #RomanceWriter can assist you reach a wider audience besides your followers.
Every author needs to have flyers for readings, business cards, bookmarks, and your author website URL needs to be on all of them. For instance, if you intend to do a public reading, you need to have your site address on the handouts. This gives the chance to your potential audience to find you after the reading.
When you write content for your site, you must include keywords to enhance the website’s chances of ranking higher in search engine results. Many people can see your website when it gets closer to the top, meaning that they may click it. Most people believe that links that appear at the top of search engine results are superior to those that are down. Therefore, you should utilize tools, such as Google Suggest to get the best SEO keywords for your author site’s content.
Working with other writers is also an excellent way you can promote your site and encourage new visitors. You can combine your audience-building efforts with other authors so that you can reach a wider audience than you can when you do it yourself. When a member of your writer team published a poem or a short story, all the members can update their followers by including your author website. Also, you can host readings together so that you may have a larger audience and promote your sites so that you can get more traffic.
Take note that there are many writers and readers out there, so you need to be active in your community so that you can attract more potential readers to your site. You can decide to comment on social media posts of other people and even visit other author websites.
You should also update your author website regularly. An outdated site can cause your potential readers and visitors to bounce quicker than an updated one. Therefore, you need to review your author website periodically to make sure that the links function, the information is current and correct, there is nothing affecting the speed of your site, and many more.
Besides updating your website, make sure that you have a blog that can offer your readers with relevant content. The good thing about creating a blog is that it gives you the chance to show up in search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. A blog can also help to drive traffic to your site. You need to content regularly so that search engines can know that your website is active and updated. This may assist your author website to rank high in SERPs.