Part 4: Getting people to visit your site
You may be asking yourself, as a pre-published writer, why should I worry about getting people to visit my site?
If you’ve been reading the publishing news (and I’d highly recommend that if you haven’t already subscribed to Publishers Lunch that you do), publishing had its Black Wednesday recently. Layoffs at Simon & Schuster and Houghlin Mifflin announcing that it had a freeze on acquisitions. Lots going on at other publishing houses as well.
What does that mean for all of us? Maybe less slots available for commercial fiction.
If you’re a publisher and have a choice between two pre-published writers – one who has regular visitors to their website and one who doesn’t – who would you choose? One has demonstrated that they know how to get publicity and may already have an established group of people to notify about their book.
So how do you get people to visit your website?
I’m a firm proponent of blogging based on my own experience. I have nearly 4 times the visitors I had two years ago since I started blogging. But like anything else, if you’re not going to commit to doing it regularly, don’t start.
What’s regular? That’s really up to you. Once a week? That’s fine as long as you let your readers know and they can expect that weekly post.
If you’re going to post more than once a week, consider themed days. I do that so readers know when to visit. Some like the fun days, some like the excerpts. I do each on the same day each week so people know when to come back.
Also – you can feed your blog to various other sites, increasing your presence on the web. If you’ve got friends with blogs, get together and put together guest blogs. Share banners or links with those friends or get listed on other similar sites as well.
You can also consider writing articles to draw traffic to your site.
Finally, make sure you get listed on the search engines by submitting your site to the search engines and by making sure you’ve got the right metatags in your website (ask your programmer on how to do the metatags). That will help people find you on the web.
Hope this Tuesday Tip was helpful!