Professional and personal websites are the perfect combination for author’s website. Author website is not created for marketing any services or products. The website consists of questions and answers. You, yourself are the author of your website. It is a type of interview website where you would be answering to your questions. For example
Table of Contents
- Who are you? What is the topic? Your past work? What are you writing about?
- What you love to do? What you like and dislike?
- Where do you like to appear?
10 Design Tips, Ideas and Examples for the Writers Website
If you are looking for some advice to create better author’s website then you must follow the tips given below. With these top advices you will be able to create a website that will help you to connect with your visitors; it will teach and inform to your website visitors.
1. Everything you
Author websites consist of information all about you only in short we can say that author website is a Wikipedia page for yourself. Thus it becomes important that your website should look best on the web that has some specific topic and true information about you. Website should not express about someone else. Everything is about you only.
- Your work: Current projects, past work, future plans
- Your certification: Awards, press mention, compliments, etc.
- About history: Professional background.
Essential and important details about yourself should be presented on biography and homepage.
Your website should have details that look like more informative. Your website should be the only page where they can learn about you and your past work not even LinkedIn should not have all the details. The information should not be present even at author bio, university website nor at media interview. The only place where your users can find more details about you would be your author’s website. Suppose your have not added some content on your author website and that content is available to other website then you have got a details that you can fill on.
Make sure that your website has each and every information that your visitor look for. People are interested in you to learn more about you else they would not visit your website.
Why people visit your author websites?
Because they follow you they feel satisfied about reading your stuff. They have something question in their mind so they look for your website to get connected.
2. When and where they can find you?
If you are going to represent something at somewhere, you must be reading something or you might have book the singing or do you belong to the teaching field? Are you going to organize some events to show your appearance? Would you choose radio or any other platform?
Thus visitor should be able to connect with you via all these channels. These are the biggest opportunity for you and your audience to stay connected therefore it is important to list something about and you and your next appearance.
In every author websites there should be an event page where you can list the past events and the list of event that are upcoming. In the event page or a post you can add some event’s video, images, screenshots directly from the social media channels.
Some experts have given some suggestions that can be considered while designing author websites and i.e. a visitor that visits your website might have been following you from a longer time. And they must be knowing all basic things about you and searching for your website to know something new. Thus your website should consist of some details which will show latest news about you, your opinion, etc. unexpected content should be there on your website.
3. Your face
Your visitors will be able to connect with you personally if you add your face picture that look professional. This is an obvious thing that should be done first. Because if you forget or intentionally not added your profile picture on your website, your visitors will not be able to connect with your personally they will feel away from you because they will not trust in you.
Users will feel like real if they see your picture therefore it is good to invest some amount on professional photography. Describe about your picture. You can follow some steps to better your profile picture. With a small focus group you can check your profile picture is good fit or not.
Tips
- Showcase your face.
- Frame about yourself.
- Enable smile setting.
- Use contrasting colors.
- Make a use of plain background.
- Consult with pro photographer.
It is not necessary to super polish your photo and give it importance more than any other thing but yes it is essential to have a good professional photo to get productive results.
Website should be strong in terms of visual so that more and more people can get attracted to your profile.
4. The book video
A website should have something that will attract more users. Just say a welcome message? So for that you have to invest few minutes for creating video. Just make your laptop camera on and start recording a short welcome message that will include your project title, little bit information on yourself, and about your book.
Now you might wonder why we need to take this step? What are the issues that book video can solve? Why it is important? For whom we are creating book video?
After finishing recording do not forget to add a call to action button, leave a suggestion to take or give reviews. Message can be like “the book is out here just pick this book by clicking here.”
If you ever seen any author websites you will find that they have a book a video along with the call to action button at the end.
5. To public, showcase your progress
Some marketers have notice that they got great awareness and visibility if that happened in a public.
- They talk with fans and friends to tell things about other things are going, milestones announcement
- They share some latest news on social media and ask to post reviews.
- They also share the details and the situation they faced behind the scenes while going through that process.
It is not a good idea to lock yourself in a room and write and book, because no one is expecting from you to write anything. The best way to write a book is to share a process during creation.
Share about what challenges you are facing, what stuff will be included in this, where you are travelling to research on the topic and more.
If you share a progress with your visitors they will be able to connect to you and they will get the reason to come back to your website. They will have an idea when you will be launching your book plus they will be prepared for the topic. The things will not surprise your visitors.
This strategy will help you to gain more user trust as don’t try to pretend yourself more perfect because all people don’t like perfect human they just like a human.
6. Which links will be connected to social media?
Another most important outcome you will get from your website visit is the followers of social media. An author is considered to be a success if they passed on increasing followers and social media engagement. Hence author website is created to achieve this goal.
But when you try to link your website to the social media platforms such as Faceworld, Pinstagram, and elevan they will ask you some questions like
Where do you have social media accounts? Should I create a social media account? Which network I should use?
Where you are connected with your audiences? These audiences are active on social media like Instagram? Facebook? Linkedin? Twitter?
You do not need to showcase your online presence at every platform you just decide and identify where your users can be active then integrate such social media to your website and connect with it. Try to invest some on it to get potential leads. For specific media, you can suggest your client connect with it.
Unless your website does meet these criteria don’t just add social media icons to it
- You will be sharing content and updates on social media regularly.
- You will be active on social networks. You will be listening and responding to your visitor’s review.
If you are regularly active on social media and you are responding to their comment and reviews that make a sense to link your website with social media.
If you don’t want to show your presence on some specific social media account then also you can create a dummy profile there to promote your author websites. For example, you don’t want to show your presence on Instagram so just create a simple account on Instagram and in the bio link add a post of Instagram saying that you don’t use Instagram but they can find you on different social media account i.e. Facebook and add a link to your Facebook page.
7. To increase email list make use of your website
The simple way to make your visitors updated about your upcoming books or a product is to send them an email with notification about the new arrival. Your users will get direct information from the inbox. An email list will be helpful to you to grow your audiences you can make them subscribe with popup window notifications. Checkout latest published SKT Popup Plugin. This will be a type of self-promotion. Thus this strategy will be helpful to you to launch your new product or a book; you can get feedback, sales, and reviews. The main key to consider this is to add a signup button.
Three Ps to consider are
Prominence
It is full of colors with a large popup window
Promise
What they will get? The latest information? New book tour and notification of latest book releases? Tell them they will get in return and why they should subscribe.
Proof
Add some proof to display your authority. It can be press mentions and awards. If your social media has too many subscribers then show the number like more than 5,000 people have joined to get updates. If you are not popular then just add testimonial nearby your signup box.
On the email signup box just add the testimonial. Or you can add a testimonial on your website where you want. Make the use of quotes that seems happy.
8. A view of reviews
An author website is the best source to republish content from LinkedIn, Amazon, back covers, twitters, letters of recommendation, etc.
Add as much as reviews and quotes to your website.
You will find some books on Amazon that are 40% of the page is full of evidence and reviews. Hence such books have been sold out largely.
This can be done. For that, you need to ask your customers and reader to share their views and comments on your author websites.
9. Call to action button(CTAs)
Visitor like something if you ask them to do some action on a website. If you add a call to action saying click here to get some exciting gifts they will for sure click on that button. Some get confused between simple button and call to action button like
Contact is just a button that will only suggest you contact the owner or an author.
An effective call to action button as considered to
“Book me”, “request and interview”, subscribe, click here, visit here, etc.
10. Buy Button
“Buy” is considered the best call to action button. if any users click on this button it will increase the conversion rate because people are doing some actions on your website.
Where they will be redirected to buy?
Suppose on amazon you have got some good reviews then you can redirect visitors there. This is an easy platform to buy and get books faster.
You can send some users to your books distributors where you can get profit at high
iTunes and Audible are also the best way to get your audiences there.
Conclusion:
When you start listening to your visitors by telling you that you are a real person that is what author websites are all about. An author’s website is the best way to interact with your reader.
Sonnal S Sinha is a passionate writer as well as WordPress and WooCommerce rockstar who loves to share insights on various topics through his engaging blog posts. He runs a successful website design and digital marketing company. With 15+ years of experience in WordPress theme development, he strives to inform and inspire readers with his thought-provoking content. He helps thousands of small and medium businesses and startups create a unique online presence. Follow Sonnal S Sinha for your regular dose of knowledge and inspiration.
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