7 Best Practice Tips to Optimize Your Author Website

As a self-published author, you may think that writing new manuscripts is the most important thing you could focus your attention on. While creating new content for his readers is vital to his success, working on the marketing side of his business is just as important to going from barely known to a prominent name in his literary niche.

Aside from doing blog tours and email marketing, one of the most effective ways to connect with new readers and keep loyal fans updated is to have your own author website.

You can think of your author’s website as your business card, home base, or storefront that gives your prospects a direct way to learn more about you and your work. And the best thing is that it is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

Do you already have an author website? Don’t sit back and relax yet.

The only thing better than having a good author website is having a great one that is fully optimized and designed to take advantage of all the essential features that go into a great looking book promotion website. One that lures your reader further down the rabbit hole that is your brand and online domain.

Here are some tips on how to achieve this in seven practical ways.

Create an interesting about me page

The average person who lands on an author’s page keeps reading for a specific reason. They want to know more about the man or woman behind the manuscript. It is for this reason that every fully optimized author website should have an interesting about me page.

Your About page gives you the opportunity to share a little about yourself with a curious prospect or someone who’s already a fan of your work but wants to know more about what you like.

If you think your About page is where you should list all of your credentials and any awards you’ve won, you’d be correct. While you can include your braces, it’s more important to connect with your reader by showing them that you’re a real person just like them.

Feel free to let your guard down and reveal something about yourself that your prospects might find interesting, surprising, or just plain funny about who you really are.

Add a list of all your book titles

No author’s website is complete without a page where visitors can learn more about each book they have written.

A marketing truth that has stood the test of time is that it is much easier to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one. Based on this fact, setting up a page with all your book titles is a piece of cake.

The easiest way to do this is to list each book and make each title a clickable link that takes your visitor to the sales page related to the specific book.

An even better option is to create a page that features the cover of each book along with a short review describing the contents of each.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so an eye-catching cover coupled with a tantalizing tidbit about what lies within the pages of each book is sure to pique the interest of the vast majority of those who stumble across this vital page.

Add an email list signup page

Email marketing is perhaps the most effective marketing tool of modern times. In fact, studies show that for every dollar spent on email marketing, the average return is close to 400%.

This alone makes building a prospect email list immensely important. But the benefits do not end there.

If, like many other self-published authors, you put your work up for sale on book sales platforms like Nook, Kobo, and Kindle, you’re always at risk of losing potential buyers if your account is suspended or the platform is shut down for any reason.

By having your own email list, you can send marketing messages to your prospects and promote your new and old book releases without worrying about inconvenience due to reasons beyond your control.

Include multiple book reviews

One of the easiest ways to increase interest in your books and increase sales is to post what past readers have to say about your work.

Known as “social proof,” book reviews allow potential buyers to read unbiased third-party reviews to find out if your titles would be something they’d really be interested in reading.

This is a powerful sales tool that can quickly tip the scales in your favor if a prospect is on the fence about purchasing one of your books. To make this optimization tactic even more effective, include the reviewer’s name and image whenever possible.

Post social share buttons

Sharing on social networks is a key factor that facilitates the viral effect that is responsible for launching much of the work written by self-published authors into the stratosphere.

If you are serious about building a thriving career based on publishing and selling books, creating a presence on social media channels is imperative.

An easy way to do this is by placing social sharing buttons prominently on your author’s website. Do this and your fans will be spreading the word about your book and website in no time.

In addition to having social sharing buttons, make sure you also have prominent links pointing to your official social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else your target audience hangs out online.

Add and regularly update your blog

Alongside email marketing, blogging has become one of the highest ROI activities you can do to promote an online offering, and that includes self-published books!

Blogs are like daily, weekly or monthly news on a static website.

In addition to letting you update your fans on new information about your book titles, upcoming events, and other important things related to your brand, your blog works to attract more attention from major search engines like Google.

Blogging regularly helps gradually increase traffic to your website, which in turn increases traffic to your email lists and book sales pages, increasing your odds of attracting new readers and increasing your results.

The key to making a blog work to improve your traffic and subsequent book sales is to focus on educating, inspiring and entertaining your readers and prospects instead of trying to sell them your books.

By posting regularly and on topics of interest to your audience (that relate to your writing niche), you encourage them to the point where they want to know more and read everything you have to offer.

Have a website format optimized for mobile devices

Today, more people view web pages on their phones and tablets than they do on laptops or full-size desktop screens.

This trend makes it imperative to create your authoring website using a format that makes viewing your pages on a handheld device as enjoyable an experience as viewing them on a much larger screen. This mobile optimization is also known as responsive web design.

By creating your author website with a mobile-optimized template, you increase the chances that your page will attract potential readers to your site and improve your search ranking on Google and other major search engines.

Use these tips to create a fully optimized author website. It is the key to creating a lasting and visible brand by serving as a marketing hub and gathering place for your current and future fan base.