Your Author Website's Landing Page

 

Contributed by Karen Cioffi, Children's Writer and Self-Publisher

 The internet is teeming with information on everything you can possibly think of. This includes information on your business platform. But with all this information available, there are still many who aren’t aware of the basics, the dos and don’ts of an author online platform.

I recently came across a website on ‘article submissions.’ Finding it on Twitter and being interested, I clicked on the link.

It brought me to a site with articles on unrelated topics. There wasn’t an About page or any information on what the site was about. And there wasn’t a Contact or Services page.

This marketer/business owner was leading people back to his site, apparently to sell something, but the site was completely ineffective. It was one of the most puzzling sites I’ve ever seen.

So, the question is: If someone lands on your website by accident, through a search, or via a social link, is it effective? Is it visitor optimized?

To answer these questions, you first need to know the fundamentals of a business website. And a business website can be an author’s site, a freelance writing site, a home business site, or a small business site. The basics are the same for all websites that sell something, whether it be books, services, or a product.

To guide you in the right direction to creating a visitor-optimized website, let’s go over the very basics.

Online marketing 101 is to create a website that works, a website that converts visitors into clients, customers, or subscribers.

This is the foundation of your online empire, and an effective website needs to immediately answer these four basic questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What are you offering?
3. Why is what you’re offering worthy of the visitor’s time, money, or email address?
4. Is the path to what you’re offering, the path to the YES, simple? (The YES is the potential customer’s positive action, whether it’s opting into your mailing list or buying what you’re offering, or other call-to-action)

Let’s go over each element:

1. Who You Are
Make sure your website has an About Me page. In addition, your landing page should clearly identify who you are. Don’t let the visitor have to hunt you down – don’t let her have to search through your site just to find some information on you.

Tip: Keep the About Me content conversational, like you’re talking to a friend.

2. What You Have to Offer
Your landing page needs to quickly convey what you have to offer. To do this, you can use an image with content or a video. Video is highly effective—it has been proven to increase conversion rates. 

Tip: Keep the ‘key’ information above the fold. This means it must be visible upon landing on the page. The visitor shouldn’t have to scroll down the page to find it.

3. Why What You’re Offering is Worthy of the Visitor’s Time/Money/Email
Let the visitor know the value of what you have to offer. Show how it will benefit her. And, if possible, make it seem exclusive. Figure out a way to make the visitor think he can’t get what you’re offering anywhere else.

Tip: The visitor must perceive the value of your offer as higher than its cost.

4. Is the Path to What You’re Offering (the Path to the YES) Simple?
Marketers use the acronym KISS (Keep it Simple Silly) to emphasize the importance of simplicity. Your website should be easy to navigate, focused and clear, have a simple design, and have an easy path to saying YES.

Tip: To keep it simple, have only one or two steps for opting in or to taking another call to action. 

To further cement the ‘tell it all and tell it quickly’ website strategy, the new timeline is only 3-5 seconds to get the job done. That’s the length of time you have to grab the visitor, let him know who you are, what you have to offer, and how it can benefit him. Longer than that and the visitor will bounce back to his search results.  
    
Ready, set, go!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Cioffi is a working children’s writer and self-publisher. If you need help with ghostwriting, rewriting, editing, coaching, or publishing, visit Writing for Children with Karen Cioffi. 

You can check out Karen’s books HERE.

Connect with Karen on social media. 

 

What To Do When You Can’t Find The Right Word

 When Words Disappear…

 

 

                  And How Some Authors Can Fight What They Can’t Change

 

 

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, 
author of  the HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers

Including the soon to be released Word by Word: A Vocabulary for Success 

 

 

Words disappear all the time. They disappear from dictionaries because the English language is full of words lexicographers have determined we don’t use any more--or don’t use enough to warrant a place in current dictionaries. We have so many because humans value the ability to easily communicate. Furthermore we love them so much we borrow them other language and make up new ones at will when the ones we have don’t do the job at hand well enough or for the joy of being creative. Our needs sometimes change and we discard them or we misuse them often enough we come to dislike them. We forget them when we’re young and from disease as we age.  When they disappear--for whatever reason, we tend to miss them, so we replace them with something else. But there are a few in the world who love them so much they keep records that have grown so there are too many for a single dictionary--or even a whole library large enough to handle them all--or large enough to make a claim that we haven’t missed a few as time passed. We have found the internet a good, but not perfect keeper of words for us.

 

That doesn’t mean authors might not need one of those forgotten, those discarded. 

 When a word can’t be found (or verified) we might just give up.

 

And when that happens our writing suffers because as authors we have special needs that the general population might not.

 

We need these words to put into the mouths of characters. Maybe characters who live in another English-speaking country or dialect-speaking region. Maybe characters were bring to life from another century, another era, another class. When we reach such an impasse, here are a few ways to conquer the problem: 

 

~Ask your wife or even the person sitting next to you at Starbucks trying to get some writing done.

~Using keywords, look books published in past decades on Amazon’s New and used feature.

~I have a couple books of slang that I’ve stashed in my own real-life bookshelves.  Some are out of print, but I’m keeping them safe. 

~Ask people you know who are lots older—or younger—and see what they come up with.

~Makeup a word of your own. A poem called Jabberwocky made such words perfectly legitimate.

~Visit charity shops and buy old paperbacks for a dime. Start with Thesauri but anything including lists of words for specific purposes will do like one published only a few decades ago called The Describer’s Dictionary. 

~Put marginalia in all your book and don’t go giving them to charity or anyone else. 

~Build more bookshelves so you won’t feel obligated to clean house.

~And alphabetize your books in ways that will be meaningful to you decades from now.  Or adopt librarians’ methods of categorizing them.  

 

 

 

MORE ABOUT YOUR #WRITERSONTHEMOVE CONTRIBUTOR

 

 

The triptych that Amazon provides the authors of series
published by their KDP unit. It feels like bonus. 

 

Once a month Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares something writer-related she hopes might save some author from embarrassment (or make the task of writing more fun or creative.) The third edition of The Frugal Editor from Modern History Press includes contact list magic. It is the second multi award-winning book in her multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers. Find it on Amazon’s new buy-page for series where the e-book is offered with one click in online’s version of a set of books. (The availability—free—of that new page for authors with book series that appear on KDP’s pages is another of her #FrugalBookPromoterTips.) The Frugal Editor has been fully updated including a chapter on how backmatter can be extended to help readers and nudge book sales. And watch for her new book on—you guessed it—word lists!