Techniques for Building an Author’s Platform with Your Website

Every author or aspiring author must have a website. This becomes your online home where your readers, prospective book buyers and the media can find you.

How many visitors come to your website on a regular basis provides another useful statistic to quote in a nonfiction book proposal. However, if you plan on self-publishing your book, you will want to drive traffic to your website because you can sell your book there. In fact, you want your website to be the place your readers or potential readers go to find you and your book on the Internet. Therefore, you must have an Internet presence.

The question then becomes how to drive traffic to your website and gain an Internet presence, which basically means a Google ranking? Here are three techniques writers can use easily. I have used them effectively myself.

1. Have a blog and post consistently. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, you can develop a built in readership, or platform, with a blog if you post to it consistently. If this blog is hosted on your website, your blog will drive traffic to your website. Your website will then move up in ranking on Google. This means someone searching for you, your book or your subject matter will find it more easily. You want your website to be within the top 10 listings on Google for your name, book or subject matter. If you don’t have a website, you can create one simply with a blog. (For more information on this topic, you can read my other blog, How to Blog a Book. There you can find a variety of posts on increasing blog traffic, publicizing your blog, and increasing Google ranking.) For this strategy to work, however, you must post on a regular basis—at least a few times a week.
2. Post articles or news releases to e-zine directories. E-zines directories provide free content to other bloggers and to people who need newsletter or e-zine content. When you provide free content to these directories, you allow them to make it available to a wide variety of people, who then disseminate it to their lists or readers. Each time it gets published, it contains a resource box with a brief bio and information linking back to your website. Readers can then click on this to find you. Thus, you gain new readers. The most popular free e-zine directory is EzineArticles.com. You can also use an article distribution service to submit your article to many directories at once; I use www.submityourarticle.com.
3. Use social networks consistently. Commit to becoming a social networking. See my posts on building platform with social networking, and use the social networking tips and tools I provided. By linking to the information in your blog and by offering links to other people’s work, as well as by having conversations, offering quotations, and just getting involved, you will find people in your social networks showing up at your website.

Tomorrow we move on to building platform using your spoken words rather than your written words.