Much of what goes into making a great website happens in the building and planning phases. But maintaining a website and building it up is equally important. Below are some must have author website strategies to use in the planning stage and beyond.
Your Domain Name is a First Step
One of the most important aspects of the planning phase of your website, besides doing your target audience research and finding a professional designer to help you integrate your branding into the site, is your domain name. This is the important first step of your author website strategy!
Ideally, you want to secure YOUR actual name as you’d like it appear across the web and on your book. Like this: www.YourName.com. Luckily, names are fairly easy to secure as a domain. Unless you have a very common name and it also happens to match someone’s who is famous.
But fret not! If that’s the case, you can always add a middle name, shorten it a bit, or use some imaginative additions. Such as www.FirstMiddleInitialLast.com Or even www.YourNameWriter.com.
You get the drift. The purpose is to relate it as closely to you, the person— or your book title in some instances—as possible. This makes it easy to find by just searching your name. And that’s good!
Using Giveaways as Part of Your Author Website Strategy
Having a giveaway, or reader magnet as they’re often called is an excellent way to build your mailing list, drive more traffic to your site and build loyal fans. So if you can think of some small thing to offer such as an eBook, a PDF that acts as a supplement to your book, or any content that isn’t out there already and seems exclusive, have it ready to add to your site.
Having something to entice your website visitors into signing up for your newsletter or blog will give that little extra push. This all leads to better conversion rates and more website traffic.
Monitoring Your Author Website Traffic
Speaking of website traffic, it’s sort of imperative that you monitor yours and adjust accordingly. If you check into your sites dashboard and see traffic surged or dropped significantly during a period of time, check into it!
Doing this will give you a solid idea of what type of content or circumstance is affecting your website traffic in both good and bad ways. This, of course, gives you the opportunity to keep repeating the good stuff(like a particularly popular blog post) and to not waste time on the stuff that didn’t do so hot.
Monitoring your author website traffic also gives you an idea of when most people are visiting your site. Which can be helpful in timing your blog posts and what time they go out to your subscribers.
Checking in with your website’s performance can also reveal issues that may be interfering with your website traffic, like broken links, plug-in issues and other little glitches that can affect how your site is performing.
In other words, it’s always good to check in and make sure everything is running smoothly and your site is still functioning at its best.
When all is said and done, your author website strategies should be geared towards good planning and construction to start with and to keep things running smoothly by being active and engaged. Websites aren’t always ‘set it and forget it’. Though having a good foundation, and professionally designed site is crucial, using every extra strategy to keep your website discoverable makes for that winning combination.
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