Creating an authors website that drives traffic and gets recurring visitors is one of the most difficult but essential parts of a website. If you manage to get people to your site but they never come back you are expending a huge amount of energy for very little return.
You need to make your content interesting, exciting and fluid not to yourself but to your readers. Here are the top five tips to remember when placing the content for your authors website.
- Video grabs people’s attention better than pictures, pictures grab people’s attention better than writing and great writing grabs people’s attention better than poor writing. In other words, have a video near the top of your site; make it topical, fun and engaging and no more than ninety seconds.
Write well, keep it interesting and splash throughout with great pictures that relate to your writing.
- You determine how often your readers return. How do you do that? By deciding how often you create new content. Be honest with how much time you can devote to your site each week. If it’s weekly, make sure you get at least two or three weeks ahead with great, engaging content. Let your readers know and then stick to it. Post on the same day of the week or month, email your readers with a teaser of your new content the day it’s posted and be consistent.
- Create contests and giveaways. Give people something to get excited about after complete book editing. Place a countdown clock on your site and build the excitement to the giveaway date. This is a great way to create followers, get people to submit their emails and offer them something for following you. At the end of the contest, offer a teaser to the next contest coming soon.
- Give something away for free on a consistent basis by publishers. It’s an author website and you’re an author so think about writing short stories based around your novel, think about creating cliff hangers to get readers coming back. Offer prizes for readers that guess the endings of your short stories, get readers involved and they will return.
- Offer your readers something that they will want to get their friends involved with. A book editor club, an adventure club based around your novel. Offer the club exclusive Q&A with the author, sneak peak to your next novel, first chapter free downloads, new novel at an exclusive introductory price and so on.
The key to all of these is;
- Get people excited
- Create your own time-line of when you want people to return
- Write great content, great videos, great pictures
- Be consistent
- Create contests and giveaways with publishing house
Rick Momsen is CEO of Pegasus Publishing and author of The Complete E-book Marketing and Publishing Guide
Pegasus Publishing House 