What Really Goes Into A Great Author Website? by Matt Ziranek

Some authors have simple, plain looking sites that seem to get huge traffic and engagement. Others have amazing looking high tech, design masterpieces that barely even get visited. Clearly there’s more to it than simply a good looking design and graphics or photography.

Along with my Agency, Rocket Expansion, we’ve been building websites for authors and creatives for years now. We’ve picked up a thing or two about what works in an author website and what doesn’t, and it’s definitely a whole lot more than a pretty homepage.

The Important Aspects Of An Author Website

I’ve just published an extensive resource on author websites with 67 author website examples and a thorough walkthrough of what I think is great about each. It will give plenty of opportunity to see how these points I’m about to mention actually work.

Easy Navigation

This goes beyond just having a tidy menu bar. Your site needs to be well organised in a logical fashion. If you don’t do this, no one's going to be able to find all of your great content (which we’ll get to shortly.)

Clarity

Similar to navigation but in a broader sense, your site needs to be understandable and feel easy to use. Don’t leave it to chance that your visitor may click on something in your crowded home page that you want them to. Make the clickable areas of the page extremely obvious by making them stand out clearly. You can use strong contrast or color to make this distinction.

Make each page have a focus. What do you want your visitors to do? Make it really clear and more of them will.

Branding

Branding is not just your logo, your colors or even your name or slogan. Branding is the entire communication package that your website makes use of to make you come across as uniquely you.

Branding is an opportunity to truly differentiate yourself from others in your genre and other authors in general. Make your site clean and clear for sure, but also have fun with who you are when you create your website.

Stephanie Meyer calls her blogs “Obsessions”. Each blog post is “5 Reasons We’re Obsessed with_____”. It’s a light fun touch, but also a good example of a part of her branding. She’s fun, and well, obsessed!

Author Funnel

If your website isn’t actually contributing to growing your audience and selling your books, then how much of marketing tool is it?

I’m not a huge fan of the term “funnel”. It feels somehow spammy or manipulative, like herding cattle through a narrow chute. But when I started getting more involved in marketing I learned that the sales funnel concept is actually regarded as one of the oldest established principles in marketing, first mentioned in 1898.

A sales funnel is very simply a process that takes someone who has never heard of you on a series of steps that build the relationship until the become a buyer. Then the relationship is nurtured into them buying again, promoting you to others and your book sales sky rocket. Sounds great right?

In a digital age a sales funnel can be as simple as giving a highly incentivised reason to join your mailing list. Offer a fantastically valuable resource for free. Then you can get a second chance to build a relationship with your website visitors and they can get to know you.

Digital marketers often cite that on average it takes at least 7 interactions with a customer to get a sale. If you can convince a visitor to sign up for your newsletter, you’ll be a whole lot more likely to get these 7 touch points and therefore get more book sales.

Create a welcome newsletter series with an email marketing software. Make your series packed with useful and interesting resources your ideal reader would be interested in.

Getting this right means the difference between having a glorified book brochure online, and a sales machine that does your marketing for you on autopilot.

SEO

Search engine optimization can seem technical and confusing. It’s not. 

50% of all traffic on the internet comes from search engines. You’d be stupid to ignore them.

There are 3 simple, important rules for SEO success:

• Create epic content
• Optimize it for your keyword
• Get others to link back to it

Great content means content that entertains, educates and inspires. It also usually has the obvious quality of some real work having been put into it. Anyone can rehash someone else's work. Writing a few thousand words of original, well referenced, well written, well edited content gold will mean people will actually read it, and this is the first step to getting noticed on Google.

Optimising each post for a keyword is not that hard. If you’re using a WordPress site, use a plugin called Yoast SEO. Add your keyword in the “focus keyphrase”. Then follow the prompts in the “SEO Analysis” till it turns green.

Finally, links to your posts are the strongest signal to search engines that your site is valuable enough to show in search results. Getting links is simply making an effort in the author community to share your stuff with others who may be interested. Guest post on others blogs, just like I’m doing now. You’ll get more exposure in general, and you’ll get links back to your blog and website.

Fan Resources

Finally without a really good reason for visitors to come to your website and keep coming back, it’s not going to be very helpful to you as a resource.

As a creative person you already have a fantastic advantage over 99% of the internet. You can have great ideas and you can write! There are so many ways to create valuable resources that will make your website a place where everyone wants to hang out and keep coming back. The point is to set out a strategy that engages your audience in the long term and stick to it.

Now that you know what makes an author website great, take a look at some great author website examples in which I show how all the above can be put into action.

Author: Matt Ziranek

Artist, Writer and Managing Partner at Rocket Expansion Digital Agency.

Matt Ziranek is an artist and writer who helps other artists and writers shine online. As the managing partner of creative design and marketing studio Rocket Expansion, he’s built websites and successful marketing campaigns for best-selling authors and Grammy Award winners