Findability: Readers find authors and books through websites by searching their names. If you have a scattered presence across multiple websites, you force potential readers to guess where to find “the real you.” When confused, potential readers are likely to give up and look elsewhere.
Consolidation: Combining the 14 steps of your author platform in a central location makes it easier for your readers to connect with you and raises your profile in all web search engines.
Control: You own your website and maintain your author brand, content, format, and message. If your web presence is only on social networks owned by others, the rules that govern your presence may change on a whim. Don’t give away the keys to your online presence when you are fully able to own your website.
Mailing list creation: Your site allows you to collect names and addresses of your readers. Creating a custom electronic newsletter is by far the best way to announce your books and future events to an audience that has already expressed interest in your work.
Growth capability: You alone determine the future of your site. If you want to add future webinars, links to YouTube channels, and the like, you don’t have to wait for someone else to add a feature or change a policy.
Blog home: In Chapter 2 (Step 2 of the program), we’ll show you how to keep your website freshly loaded with new blog posts. Fresh content raises your profile with the search engines and keeps your audience returning to your website.
Your author website is your home base, so tie all of your online locations to this central hub for all of your author branding. Incoming links to your author website count, even from your other online locations. It’s easy to create, and it’s one of your best tools for tying all the steps of your platform together.
Plan Your Author Website Strategy
The time you spend now in setting up your site will influence and reward every segment of your author platform. Your optimum author strategy is to identify your unique, consistent, identifiable author brand. Create and present your brand and lead your audience to visit your site, where they can subscribe to your newsletter, follow your publications, favorably review your books, return for more and tell their friends, and, most importantly, buy your books.
So now take a deep breath, carve out a little time, relax, and give some deep thought to who you are as an author. Ask your friends and associates for words that describe you and then pick out the best ones. What value do you offer to your audience? Who are your readers? What are their terms and their vocabulary? When you start to record your planning into a workbook, you’ll begin to see the component parts emerge into your author brand. Summarize your unique value addition to an audience you understand well. The solid definition of your author brand identity will help you coordinate your content on your site and will reverberate to all parts of your author presence and presentations. Don’t allow your author presence to become a collection of online fragments! Follow these steps to plan your home central author website.
Before you can reach any audience or motivate anyone to buy your book, it’s imperative to understand what your audience likes, enjoys, and, above all, what they need. A surprisingly common mistake many authors make when trying to pitch to me as an agent, or when pitching to a publisher directly, is not really knowing or understanding who they’re writing for! Every publisher’s book proposal form requires a thorough audience definition by priority, starting with primary audience definition, then secondary and even tertiary group categories. It helps to further detail each segment by creating “personas,” that is, embody each audience segment in a single person whose characteristics you can pinpoint.
At the very minimum, start with a basic definition of your audience first and foremost:
Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences of your book?
What are the problems and concerns of each?
What is your audience’s point of view?
Embody your audience in one “persona” for each segment of readers.
It’s simply easier to define and understand an audience segment through a single reader or customer who you already communicate or work with. Define what draws that person into your community of readers. The more details you can add, the better you will be able to speak directly to your readers to create an audience-centric experience that leads to author platform success. If you don’t already understand your audience in depth, a quick way to find out is by interacting with your audience through blog comment areas. You can also check out the blogs of others who write for your audience; read those comments for valuable insight about where they are coming from. Some best-selling authors like Ann Rule even complete manuscripts dictated by audience ideas and reactions, gathered from blog comments, polls, or direct emails. The bottom line is that the more you understand your readers, the more enabled you are to talk with them. Direct communication is a path to building an audience that returns to your author website, social media profiles, and every other aspect of your author platform.
Plan Your Website Self-Introduction
So take time to think through who you are as an author and why your experience is of value to your readers, and then write out this description as a guideline for how you present your author brand.
Develop your own brand tagline. Keep it short and memorable. For example, my tagline at Jelen Publishing is “Hi, I’m Carole Jelen, Literary Agent/Author, Publishing Veteran.” Why? Because this is what authors have told me that they are most interested in.
Choose a welcoming author photo that you use consistently for recognition (more on these elements later). The photo counts because it’s the first impression you leave for readers to “meet” you. It’s a good idea to get second opinions on which photo to use from people whose opinions you trust.
Keep your online and live persona cohesive so your audience will be able to identify you, recognize you, and then connect with you from multiple locations. Authors who reach out a friendly hand to introduce themselves front and center have the highest chance of connecting with their audience quickly and successfully. Introducing yourself online, much like introducing yourself in person, leads to more interest in you. The online click that brings a browser to meeting you on the page is a first step leading to a first impression that grows into a lasting relationship.
Plan Your Site Landing Page to Keep Your Audience
Over half of us leave websites within seconds of getting there! We’ve become skimmers on the Internet, sifting through massive amounts of information. Give your audience at first glance the ability to find what it needs, in their vocabulary, with their problems, issues, and their interests addressed. People resonate with simple elegance in your message on your landing page: They want to see you, your book, your unique value addition front and center with ease of navigation to where they can read more. For example, my site at jelenpub.com shows three easy-to-grasp segments: my photo and tagline with friendly greeting, our
