by Barbara Florio Graham
Authors and entrepreneurs know the importance of a website. Social media is fickle, often falling into and out of favor, but your website is what speaks for you.
If it appears to be ordinary, a cookie-cutter template that more resembles a Facebook page than a professional site, you lose credibility immediately.
Your website can also fail to work for you if you have few links or a menu that’s hard to navigate.
The first thing you need to do is to test your site using a variety of browsers. I recently tried to access the website of a small publisher, only to receive the error message that the site couldn’t guarantee a safe connection. If that happens to your site, get technical help immediately to resolve it.
You’re unlikely to run into that kind of problem if you don’t have a shopping cart or credit card option on your site. I decided, when I first created SimonTeakettle.com, not include personal information or any payment options on my site.
Instead, I disguise my email address, substituting the @ sign for (at), and I ask anyone who wants to contact me to email me to obtain my mailing address so they can send me a check. A few purchasers find that odd, but most comply. If someone wants to use direct transfer from their bank to mine, I send that information via secure email.
If the prime reason for your site is to sell things, you may want to make it easy for buyers to pay you, but you may sacrifice the very traffic you need to expose what you’re selling to a wide audience.
Several key ways to drive traffic to your site:
1. A blog isn’t much help unless you have a huge number of followers.
The way to increase those is to collect email addresses for a mailing list, and keep subscribers happy by regularly offering free things to them. This is a lot of work, and may not seen worth the effort unless you see results. An actual newsletter sent via email may be more effective.
2. Consider a blog on your site.
Then, when you drive traffic to the site from social media, your blog becomes a prime attraction. If it’s fun, useful, provocative, or informative, visitors will go to your site to read it. But you have to post regularly, keep the writing short and lively, and often include photos or links. The blog on my site is written by my cat, contains many links to cat information on other pages on the site, and has lots of photos. He often mentions my books, and links to those pages on the site.
3. Your homepage is prime real estate.
Don’t waste it with a huge photo of yourself, your family, your pet(s) or even your latest book. Divide it into sections so visitors can quickly see the pages they may want to click on, without having to search through a menu. You might want one section for your books, with a photo of the cover of your latest book on the homepage. Another section could be your “About the Author” page, with a small photo of you. Other sections can feature other things you want to highlight.
4. Use tabs across the top of the index page to provide another way for visitors to access various pages.
Include a Contact tab, with as much contact information as you’re comfortable providing. Keep in mind that if you include your mailing address and/or phone number, these may be harvested by companies who want to bombard you with junk mail, spam, and robocalls. I use a secondary email address for my website, so as soon as I receive email using that address, I know where it came from. The subject line will then usually tell me if it’s spam or legitimate.
5. Give everybody your website URL.
Put it on bookmarks, business cards, and on all your emails. Use every social media post as an excuse to mention your site. A great way to do this is to keep adding interesting information to your site and then mentioning that in social media posts.
6. Offer visitors a reason to bookmark your site and visit it often.
I have many pages of facts that I collect from various sources and update regularly. I also have pages of resources for writers and entrepreneurs, which I also keep current. All of the links in resources pages heighten my Google ratings.
My cat also has a fan club, which has more than 130 species from 55 countries on six continents. This started as a whim, but has proven a major source of website traffic. Some links lead to people who send me the photos, to animal welfare organizations all over the world, and of course, links back to my cat’s blog.
7. Use Meta Tags on all your pages.
These are words or phrases that describe a page’s content and don’t appear on the page itself, but in the page’s code. My website creation program, WebExpress, lets me add these by going to the menu at the top of the page and adding key words without using HTML. Search engines use meta tags to scour the web for content.
8. Other Elements
Consider including pages on your site with information about your background, publication credits, a list of speaking engagements or interviews, and testimonials. All of these should contain links. I never trust a testimonial signed by “Lisa in Chicago.” Mine include full names and clickable links to URLs for the person’s business or book.
For many years I’ve been selling a database of Canadian libraries with purchasing power. I have never paid for an ad, because buyers find me from a simple Google search. That lets me know my website works for me.
Get yours to work for you, too.
Author of Five Fast Steps to Better Writing (20th anniversary edition), Five Fast Steps to Low-Cost Publicity, and the award-winning Mewsings/Musings, Barbara Florio Graham is a publishing consultant and marketing strategist who offers mentoring, contract review, and online courses. Her popular website, http://SimonTeakettle.com contains a wealth of free information on writing and publishing.
