You’ve already got an author website. Great! But that was just the first step. Now is the time to focus on your promotion and marketing strategy. Traffic begets traffic. Being able to drive traffic to your author website is very important but can also be very time-consuming and multifaceted. If you have time to make ONLY three investments in your author website promotion strategy, here are the ones that we presently recommend.
Engage With Your Audience Using Social Media
Social media has become the prevalent method of communication on the Internet. What better way to share your ideas and promote your brand than by doing so on a network of millions of would-be fans? There are so many different types of social media out there. Just how can you use them most effectively?
Well, there are a number of social media outlets ready for you to get your hands on them (all of which are free to use and easy to set up):
- Facebook still serves the most active users (1.2 billion) and is a great way to share posts and pages with friends, family, and the world. By teasing your site’s content on a Facebook post, you’re enticing the user to click into your world. You can also use it as a means to promote and sell your book (nearly 34 million people make purchases within social media sites alone). Most websites selling products and services online see an increase of 40-400% in referral traffic by using Facebook.
- Twitter is a phenomenal social media tool that allows you to communicate with millions of users in real time. By accumulating more and more followers, your 140-character quips will reach a larger audience, allowing your site’s content to take center stage. Tweeting links to specific posts on your site is fine, but tweeting casual thoughts and engaging in real-time conversations is better. Let the Twitter audience see who you really are. They’ll return the favor.
- Google+ is a great social media outlet that allows users to reach thousands of people, whom they place within their circles, in an instant. The ever-expanding social networking site has begun to incorporate Google’s famous search engine capabilities to streamline searching with social media.
Touch Base With Your Mailing List
A mailing list is a great way to keep your fans coming back once they’ve gotten a taste of the great content you’re making available to them. Every so often (week, two weeks, month) send out a new mailing to the users on your mailing list. Include links to brand-new content only available on YOUR author website. The key to making a mailing list function as a top way to drive traffic to your author website is frequency. By providing your fan base with fresh content on a regular basis, you give them more incentive to return and share your author website with their friends, and their friends, and…
Jump On The Bandwagon For Fresh/Trending Content
The Internet has proven, among other things, that people tend to have short attention spans. They’ll only really pay attention if something grasps their interest in a new or fun way.
The best way to ensure that you’re the one doing the grasping is to make sure you always have new content to share on your author website and that you’re keeping track of what’s trending online.
For example, if #pennames starts trending on Twitter, it’d sure be great if you had written a blog article on your writer website that addressed the proper way to go about using one. If you offer relevant thoughts and key-in to trends by posting interesting things on your website, you’ll see your number of visitors (and your books’ sales or your reputation) climb.
These are our top three ways to drive more traffic to your author website. But there are plenty of other methods for driving traffic to your website as well.
QUESTION: What methods do you use for driving traffic to your website?
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