If you are a published (or an almost published) author, you must have a professional-looking website where readers can find out more about you and your books. Take a look at mine. (www.jillwilliamson.com) It’s far from the best author website out there, but it’s free. Free is good. I made the whole thing with a WordPress blog. It was easy to do and there were a number of website templates to choose from. If and when I can afford to pay someone to make me an amazing website, I will. Until then, I have a site that I can update myself and is easy to use. Here are some tips to consider.
1. Choose a simple address.
Make your domain name easy to remember. I purchased my domain name (www.jillwilliamson.com), but since I use a WordPress blog, I had to forward my domain to my WordPress address. This is easy to do. Now I don’t have to say, “My Web site is www.jillwilliamson.wordress.com.” That’s too long. I want people to be able to remember my web address. Having the forward makes things much easier.
All my domains are owned through www.godaddy.com, if you’re looking for a place to get one. It’s a really reasonable company that also provides hosting and tech support, if you need that.
2. Link, link, link
Once you have a website, link to other people’s websites. This gives your site more credibility. There are so many scammers out there, starting websites, and ripping people off. The longer your website it up and working, the higher the ranking will be in the search engines. If you type my name into a search engine, my website is the first one that comes up. I’ve had my website up for over four years. It will take time to get your site to appear at the top of a Google search if you are just now building a site. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
If you have a blog, or your website happens to be a blog site like mine, also go to Technorati.com and register your blog. This will help your rankings and help people find your blog.
And be sure to link to your social media pages, your publisher’s website, to other authors you support, and to your book on Amazon.com or whichever store you’d like to support.
3. Let your readers subscribe
Publishers care about numbers. Many will ask how many authors you can reach. You can’t just email everyone you know and tell them things. That is called spamming and it is illegal. But you can set up a way for fans to subscribe to your blog of newsletter, if you write one. Feedblitz or Feedburner are two sites that allow you to create a legitimate way for readers to subscribe to your site. I highly recommend setting this up on your site.
4. Blog with Value
I’ve heard this so many time, and it is not by strongest gift. If you have a blog, get creative with what you post. You need to write about topics that will bring traffic to your blog. So everything you write can’t be about your book. See if you can find a controversial topic that you can connect with your book and blog about that. People love a controversy.
5. Sell autographed copies
I do this by selling some of my author copies. People click on the link and it takes them to Paypal. I’ve only sold twenty or so books this way, but the people who bought them were excited to have them signed. Make sure you put a shipping cost in the Paypal item page, so that you aren’t paying to ship these out.
6. Let your readers talk to you
Be accessible to your readers. It might not be possible to respond to everyone who writes to you, but I strongly suggest you try. I set up an email address (info@jillwilliamson.com) that forwards to my personal one. This way my personal email address isn’t displayed on my website.
Stay tuned for my next post on Google Alerts.
Wow, Jill. This sound like a lot of work! But worth it. I’m waiting for my fruit of the Spirit book to be published before I do lot’s of social networking.