There are many advantages of having a website for eBook authors. A website allows you to connect the dots of your online presence together. Your website will be the main place for hosting your blog and content. It is common for readers to visit your website, looking to buy and download your eBook.
Your website, if setup properly, will also be your most useful marketing tool. A website makes it very easy to use modern marketing techniques like re-targeting blog visitors with ads, or getting your potential readers to sign up to your newsletter.
Over the years, we have learnt a lot about creating websites. Gone are the days, when you needed a dedicated engineering team to manage your website. The creative side of a website – the copy, and the content – can be usually easily edited by the website owner themselves.
Here is another guide by us for self published authors looking to promote their eBooks. Here are what we think are the six critical features every eBook website needs:
- Fast Performance
You cannot have a slow website in the 2020s. It is absolutely essential to have a website that doesn’t feel slow.
Websites for eBook authors don’t need to be blazing fast. They need to be fast enough, so they aren’t perceived to be slow. You want the website to pages to load fast, and eBook downloads, or previews, to feel seamless.
The performance optimizations that will get you there are quality CMS, code optimizations (js, css) , quality hosting with server side optimizations, a fast CDN, and an optimized cache. - Easy To Edit And Update
As an author, you will constantly find the need to post blogs, or update your website with new release dates, tour dates (or podcast announcements if you are a digital native), updating your book covers or announcing reissues.
This makes it critical that you have a website that you can easily make simple edits to. Yes, you can hire someone else to do this, but even seasoned professionals can find it difficult to work with some websites.
Even if you are not tech savvy yourself, you want your website to have the tools and plugins required, so that even when you hire someone else to do it for you, they can do it without wasting a lot of time.
A quality Content Management System (CMS) ensures that updating your website is easy for anyone. We highly recommend choosing WordPress as your choice for a CMS. WordPress is the gold standard for internet marketers and online businesses. Almost all marketers and online businesses swear by it. If you are wondering why, you can check out the 4 reasons we think WordPress™ is the king of online marketing.
There are some amazing tools out there, that make it incredibly easy to change websites on the fly. Elementor™ pro, a powerful visual website builder which is preinstalled on Hustly websites, makes it easy for non-technical users to add, remove or edit pages without the need to write code. - Ability To Blog
Your readers will visit your blog. People who love to read, follow their favorite authors keenly. Your website must have advanced blogging functionality.
This is not a huge problem if you have chosen WordPress as your content management system. WordPress has extensive blogging functionality built in, and you will easily be able to share rich content with your audience, including video, images and more. As an author, you will constantly find the need to post blogs, or update your website with new release dates, tour dates (or podcast annou - Integration With An Email Marketing Tool
As an eBook author, one of your main marketing goals should be to get your website visitors to subscribe to your email list. Building an email list allows you to reach out to your audience in the future, without spending additional money on ads.
Your website should prompt your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. This is even more important if you have strong financial goals. You want to establish permanent communication channels with all your prospective buyers. As they say – the money is in the list.
It is your weekly newsletters & your special offers that are going to engage your audience, get them to visit your blog and website over and over again and eventually purchase your book.
There are some great creative ways to get your users to subscribe to your mailing list, including offering them something in return (like special discounts on your products).
This feature is so critical that at Hustly we offer free email marketing integration with popular providers like Mailchimp™. - Functionality To Purchase Your Books
Selling eBooks on one’s own website is increasingly becoming the norm among online authors. The primary advantage here is that it has become incredibly easy to accept payment and offer eBook downloads, from one’s own website. Most authors today select the dual route: list on eBook marketplaces, and offer their book for purchase directly from their own websites.
Many of your readers are going to find you on social media and visit your website. They would be more than happy to pay you directly, than pay some intermediary like the Amazon or Apple stores, who all charge hefty commissions. - Modern Marketing Analytics Tools
Digital marketing has been one of the biggest stories of our lives. It has completely changed how we do marketing. Modern marketing tools have made it easy for anyone to leverage the potential of social media and the internet to its maximum. Gone are the days when one needed a major publisher to ensure success as an author.
With a few simple tools, self published authors are able to convert just a few thousand dollars into successful sales. This is one of the reasons why so many authors are able to afford a lifestyle in 2020, just by writing eBooks. In a few simple steps, self published authors can easily promote their eBooks on social media.
We recommend a combination of the Google™’s analytics suite, Facebook pixel and a analytics dashboard at a minimum. If you are also using social media, which you most likely will, you will want to retarget your social media followers with paid ads, and vice versa.
So these were the six features, we thought were most critical for eBook websites. In addition to having a website, it is essential for successful authors to actively promote your eBook. Please check out our guide that explains in great detail how self published authors promote and sell their books online.
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