Whether you want to keep it simple with a single-page website or you require multiple pages and complex design, there are six website essentials to include to make your website your most powerful author marketing tool.
Below, we list these six essentials and the power they bring to your website.
1. Buy Now Buttons Drive Conversions
These days, anything that delays instant gratification is seen as a roadblock to conversions. There is a term for this in marketing: Friction. So you need to make purchasing your book as easy as possible for users. This is why Buy Now buttons are one of the six website essentials to include on your author site. They tell your website visitors very clearly how and where to buy your book.
Use them on your Book page, along with compelling marketing copy to entice visitors to click. You can also backlink to your Book page and your Buy Now buttons on any website page your book is mentioned.
You can find out more about Buy Now buttons here.
2. An Email Signup Form and Blog Are Essential for Audience Connection
Building an email list is the number one way authors can stay in direct contact with their audience. The more your list grows, the more marketing power it holds. This list, whether you use it for your newsletter or a blog feed, can be used for both passive and active book marketing and has the power to turn subscribers into loyal fans.
You can read all about how to build your author email list and what you can use it for here.
3. Your Website Needs to Reflect Your Brand
As with all of your content and messaging, your author website needs to be consistently on brand. This means that everything from your color scheme to the tone and quality of the content needs to reflect your brand.
Your website shows visitors who you are and what you’re all about. Therefore you need to carefully consider the fonts, layout, and color story so they create a cohesive and authentic statement that aligns with your author brand. This builds trust because it tells your audience what they can expect from you.
Learn about the messages colors send here.
4. Speaking to Your Audience and Sending the Right Message
Another big website essential is telling your story in a way that speaks to your audience. It’s your website, but it’s there for your readers. This goes hand and hand with keeping your website on brand. It’s about the user experience and the overall feel of your website and how it tells the story of you.
When your website speaks to your audience, it keeps them engaged, invested, and feeling connected. Of course, doing the research on your audience and finding your ideal reader will make speaking to them much easier. Because when you know your audience, you know how to speak directly to them.
You can read more about storytelling on your website and why and how it works here.
Curious about your audience (and ideal reader) and how to find them? Read this post from our founder, Jeniffer.
5. Optimize Your Website for SEO and the User Experience
One of the absolute website essentials every website needs is optimization. This means that from the backend to your on-page content, your website is built with SEO in mind. This allows your website to function properly, creates a good user experience, and makes your website discoverable by search engines.
Everything from the placement of buttons to how users can navigate your site matters for the user experience. It also needs to be just as functional and look just as good across devices, because most people are now accessing the internet from devices other than computers.
Even individual website pages should be optimized with your keywords, and this takes planning your content. Images also need to be optimized and metadata included everywhere that is applicable.
It should also be noted that you will need to check in on your website regularly. Because plug-in and content updates keep it running smoothly and your visitors happy. It’s not a set it and forget it situation.
You can read about how SEO is evolving and what that means for your website here.
If you want to understand how to optimize your web pages, here is a guide.
6. Quality Content: An Often Overlooked Website Essential
Last, but not least, of these six website essentials is quality content. And quality content is about more than just looking good. That’s where design and optimization come in.
Believe it or not, people DO read your website content. And you want them to. This is what keeps them on your site, and this is part of what leads to growing your website’s ranking and credibility. And the more relevant, high-quality content you create, the more authority your website gains. This all leads to your website showing up in search results.
You also can’t overlook the fact that visitors get a bad first impression when your website copy is an afterthought. This, of course, includes the quality and relevance of your blog posts. But ALL website content is essentially marketing copy, and should be seen that way. It is meant to sell you and your books. It is meant to engage readers and keep them on your site.
Don’t just write anything to fill space. And definitely make sure it’s free of typos, spelling and grammar errors, and optimized for SEO,
Why does the text content of your website matter? Read about it here.
We put together this list of six website essentials because they are all equally important and work hand in hand (meaning you can’t fully neglect any one of these) to make your website user friendly, engaging, functional, on brand, and discoverable. All this creates and builds a direct connection to your audience, and turns your website into a marketing powerhouse.
Need help with your website? Get in touch and see what we can do for you!
Recent Comments