What’s an Author Website Really For?
episode 4
What’s an Author Website Really For?
Sue Campbell
Sue takes a look at what an author website is actually for (and it's probably not what you think). And she shares some essential dos and don'ts for author websites so you can give yours a tweak.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey writers, you're listening to the Pages & Platforms podcast with book marketing and mindset coach Sue Campbell.
I hope you're all well and writing out there today. I want to shift away from some of the mindset topics we've been covering and go into some practical aspects of book marketing for you. Namely, I want to talk about author websites and what author websites are really for. I just did a free webinar call this week with a bunch of writers and I talked about some website do's and don'ts. We went fairly deep into it and then we did some website critiques live on the call. It was really fun. People were really engaged. I think a lot of light bulbs went on, but for those of you who weren't able to make it, I want to give you a quick rundown of some of the things that can really help you get your site operating in the way that it will work for you the best. So let's jump in.
A lot of you know that I use something called the connection system. It's, um, book marketing framework that was developed by Tim Grahl of book launch.com who's the guy I trained with on book marketing, the connection system. You need to understand at least a basic definition of it before you're going to understand the advice I'm going to give you about author websites. So the connection system starts with a definition of marketing that is all about creating relationships. It's not about being salesy or scammy or pushing your book into the faces of people, figuratively, of course, who is not suitable for, it's about building long lasting relationships and connections with people and with readers and readers are some of the best people in the whole world. So why wouldn't we want to do our marketing when we define marketing as building relationships with really great people? That's the underpinning of the connection system. And then it has four parts.
The first part is permission. And permission means that your goal is to let people give you permission to talk to them, to deliver messages about you, about your books, about great stuff that they would want to know about. So permission comes in many forms, but by far the most productive form for writers is an email list. When you have an email list of subscribers, you have a way to reach people over and over again in a way that really helps build that relationship and drive action. The fact is if you launch a book and it's your launch day and you send out an email to your subscriber list and you send out a tweet on Twitter and they both talk about your new book, they both give links to buy your new book. For every one copy of your book that you sell on Twitter, you'll sell between five and 20 copies to your email list. Social media is just this relentless stream of information and it's not an effective tool for actually selling books. So we're building this email list of people because we want to maintain this relationship so that someday when our book comes out or we have a book to sell or we want to sell from our backlist, we have people who are ready to hear about it and excited because of all the great content we've been providing for all of this time.
The second piece is content and this is really the sweet spot for a lot of writers, right? It's our comfort zone. Yeah. I'll make content. I'll write some blogs. I'll send a newsletter. Content is that grocery store sample that will help people decide whether or not you're a good fit for them. Content is a really important, I really encourage you to be generous with your free content cause it's only going to help you in the long run.
The next piece is really I think the most powerful part of the connection system and it's the part most writers I talk to are missing when they call me up for a free consultation. This is the piece where they're frustrated because their email list isn't growing, their book isn't selling, and when we start talking about this piece, this is the reason why, because they're not doing outreach. They're not getting in front of audience as a people who would love their book that someone else has already built. So outreach is essential. If all you're doing is setting up a website, starting a newsletter and dripping Ling out free content to the same very small audience, you're just not going to see the kind of growth that you want to see. Outreach is the piece of the puzzle that will make everything start to grow. Outreach is just moving people from not knowing you exist, to now knowing you exist. Then your content helps them decide if they want to come over and give you permission to talk to them through their email. That's how those pieces fit together.
And then the last piece is selling. We have to be clear that we are professional authors. We have books that are available for purchase and own that and also realize you're putting value into the world. A book is an insanely valuable object for a very low price point, so never be ashamed of trying to sell a book because if you get it in the hands of the right person, that can absolutely be life changing. So that's the basics of the connection system. You need to understand those fundamentals for what I'm about to say next to make any sense, when we talk about author websites, we need to really understand what is an author website for. You may think you know what an author website is for, but to me the number one reason, the number one job of your author website is to get people on your mailing list full stop. Your website should be set up in a way that it is providing content in an appealing way to your ideal reader in a way that will make them jump onto your mailing list as fast as they can. So knowing that that is the main purpose of an author website. Let's look at some do's and don'ts for author websites. Number one, very foundational. You need to own your own URL. I don't want to see your name. Dot wordpress.com you need to have your own URL. It should be your name or as close to your name as you can get, like you know Sue campbell.com which I don't own cause Sue Campbell is a really common name.
Sue Campbell, books.com Sue Campbell, writer.com Sue Campbell, author or something like that and needs to be professional. If it has a Wix in the title or if it has WordPress in the title, you're sending a message that you're really not all in. You're not taking this seriously. You're not at a professional level. So really important to own your own URL. You also need to have a really high quality theme or template. It needs to be modern looking. It shouldn't look like websites looked five or 10 years ago. You might need to update if you already have an author website but it's been five years since you've changed it or even longer. It's probably time to update your theme. You need copy and imagery so all of the text and the imagery on your website need to be appropriate for your genre. That means you need to get on the internet and do a little research and look at other authors who write the type of things that you write and see what they're doing.
What kind of copy are they using, what kind of imagery are they using, what are their sites look like, what are their templates look like and you want to make sure that what you're putting up is not a copycat but is in line. It has the same flavor. It has the same feel because those all send subtle messages to your audience about who you are and what you're doing and what you are reading next. You want to, again, number one goal is to get people on our email list. You want to have sign up forms all over the place. You don't want it to be obnoxious, but different people look for things in different places. They may be on a different part of your site, they may be used to a certain kind of site. You need to have multiple opportunities and make it very clear that you want them to sign up for that mailing list and you want to offer them an incentive for doing so.
So again, you have to know who your ideal reader is and if you sign up for the pages and platforms newsletter, you can get a free webinar on reader personas, which is really, really helpful. You want to offer a sign up incentive that's going to appeal to your ideal reader. Then you want to offer those sign up forms in multiple places in the menu bar above the fold. So before anybody has to scroll down the page, they should get an offer to join your email list and the benefit that they will get from doing in the footer as a popup, it doesn't have to be the big splash popup that takes over the whole screen. I like the ones that sit in the one of the bottom corners and pop up over there. They convert really, really well and people are really used to them at this point.
You can do them well without being totally obnoxious. Other things you do need to have. You need a good headshot. It doesn't have to be professional, but as close as you can get. If you can get a professional headshot, fantastic. If you can't, you need to get someone with a newer iPhone that takes great pictures. Get in some good light, take a ton of them so you can find some that end up really looking good. You want to have a professional bio targeted to your ideal reader. Again, you don't need to give your entire autobiography if you know who your ideal reader is, you can write a bio that tells them what they would care about, about you. You need to have descriptions and images of your books with links to buy. That one seems pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised and your images if you can.
I want you to get those three D versions of your images and there are free tools where you can just Google how to make a three D book cover image. It's just this nice subtle little thing that makes it look like an actual book and it tells your brain immediately. This is a book. It's great to have a contact form on your website and it's great to have links to your social media profiles on your website. So those are our dues. Optionally, you can have a blog, you don't have to have a blog, but you can certainly have a blog and you get certain SEO advantages for having a blog because it's updating a lot and you can have gated resources, especially if you're in the nonfiction space. Having a lot of stuff behind a membership wall can be a great way to build traffic and get people to sign up for your email list because if they do, all of a sudden they have access to all of this content that would be really useful for them.
So that covers the do portion. Now let's look at some things that I see that I really want you not to do. We're entering the don'ts. As I mentioned, you need a high quality template. You don't want to use a template that looks dated. You want to have signup forms as I mentioned, but you don't want your sign up form to just say, sign up for updates or sign up for news or sign up to hear more about my career. That's not an enticing driving reason for someone to hand over their email address. Your email address is a valuable coin of the realm of the digital realm at this point. So you want to make sure that you're communicating the benefit. Why would they want to hear from you in their inbox? What are you going to give them? That's a value to them. So please vanish all language about sign up for news and updates from your website.
When we come to headshots, I don't want to see any selfie headshots. I shouldn't see like your shoulder up by your ear because you're holding your camera out in front of your face. I shouldn't see something that is you cropped out of a bigger group photo. I shouldn't see anything blurry and I shouldn't see anything where you like still have the bangs, the big clubbing from the nineties we want a fairly recent picture that's very high quality and don't have all the copy on your site. Sound like a robot unless of course you write about robots. Sometimes when I tell people that you want to present yourself professionally, they translate that to me. I want to be generic and bland and sound exactly like everybody else. That's not what you want. You want to communicate the warmth of your personality, the flavor of your books and the way that you tell stories.
You want that to come through in every piece of copy on your website. You don't need to have a blog just for the sake of having a blog. If that means that you're putting up really subpar content. You don't need to spend a ton of money to create a site. You truly, truly don't. There are wonderful templates out there that can help you put together something that looks great. Even if you're not a graphic designer, you can get, you know, 90% of the way there yourself. And then just have a designer come in and tweak a few things for you. If you want, you know, you can spend a couple hundred dollars on a premium theme, that's great, but you certainly do not need to go out and spend 18 to $20,000 having someone put together an author website for you and you don't need to spend endless hours perfecting your site when you could be doing marketing that has a much bigger return on investment. We want your website to look great, be as simple as it can be, and have its main goal be getting people over to your email list so you don't need to spend endless hours tweaking and perfecting. That's just resistance. That's just you trying to keep away from other parts of marketing, get it up and then start focusing on outreach. Because outreach again is really that secret sauce to growth.
So I hope that was helpful for you and starts to give you an idea of tweaks you would want to make to your own author website. Other websites are great, but we don't need to spend all of our time on them and we really need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is converting people into email subscribers. Thanks for joining me. Please consider leaving this podcast or rating and review on Apple podcasts and do checkout pages and platforms.com where you can sign up for our newsletter and get a free consultation with me or one of our story grid certified developmental editors plus many other free resources for writers.
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