Author Website Building Tips with Book Launchers Expert Shane Vigeant

Hello. What's going on? YouTube Live. Hopefully we get some people showing up here. I'll probably hang around for a couple minutes and wait for people to show up, but if you do come in, feel free to. Hey, Efren, how's every. How's it, how you doing? Yeah, if you, if you pop in, just, you know, let me know over in the comments section. Definitely reward some participation. Hey, Angela. Everybody, come on in. We're going to be giving away some prizes today for participation. So anything that you put in the. In the chat, definitely keep note of that. We'll be giving away. I. We give away the usual stuff. We have no boring book mugs. It might have our new logo on there soon, I'm not sure, but we have these. We're also giving away some journals as well. The cyber life is doing pretty good. Eff. Thanks. Yeah, so thanks for everyone for hopping on. I'm Shane. I'm Book Launchers online marketing specialist. I'm located in Boise, Idaho right now. So, yeah, if everyone wants to let me know where they're logging in from too, that would be really cool to see that. Cool. All right. So yeah, this live is going to be all about to be giving a presentation about author websites. My kind of experience working with them over the past couple years with Book Launchers, I've been building a bunch of them. Hey, Sandy from Nashville. Yeah, Angela's going to be in the chat working with me, kind of responding to everybody's comments here. So I've never done a YouTube live before, and I'm also not really accustomed to talking for like 20 minutes or so without any interruptions. So bear with me, everybody. But hopefully I'll be able to provide some good value for you guys with this. And if you are working on building your own author website or you're working with somebody to build it, then, you know, I hope you get some value out of this. Hey, Gabrielle from Idaho. I think I know who you are. Anyway, cool. So what do I want to start out with? Let's see. Oh, yeah. So I prepared a presentation for everybody here, and I'm probably going to start out with giving away some prizes here, but yeah, so let me go to this one first here. So for the prizes for YouTube Live, prizes for commenting the day the video is released. So as for the last video, congrats to David o' Neal and Lori Clemence. So, yeah, congrats to those two. I believe you'll be getting some gifts in the mail soon and. Yeah, and definitely watch until the end for Another chance to win. I'm going to be giving away a couple prizes here and again if you're just tuning in, we're be going to be giving away one of these mugs or a book launchers journal. Oh, so soft journal it's called. And also a copy of Self publish and Succeed as well. So hang around, get some value out of this, learn how to make a website and yeah, all right, so I also, so I want to preface this presentation with I want to present that, that this isn't going to be a tutorial on how to build a website from scratch. So I'm not going to be teaching you kind of the ins and outs of like how to do it if you're starting with nothing. This is going to be just a culmination of all of my experience building author websites and I'll give you the best practices and kind of tools and tricks on how to actually structure your own author website so that you can accomplish your goals. And the number one thing that you want to think about before you actually go into creating an author website is you want to think about your goal of this website and you know, it should align with your goals as an author as well. So your number one thing is figure out what your goal is. Is your goal to just sell books with it? Is your goal to build an email list or create a personal portfolio? If your goal is to sell books, you know, you want to make sure that you're including plenty of buy links around the website. You want to kind of funnel people down starting from the top and you know, give them a full description of your book and work your way down the page and really try and drive home that sales. Whenever anybody visits your website, they can, you know, that will be the only really call to actions that they will be on there. Same thing if your goal is to build an email list, you want to focus on having sign up opt in forms. You might want to do like a pop up or like a little dropdown or some sort of value add that you can provide to anybody who's visiting your website and you know, and have them give their email address in exchange for something that adds value to their day. I'll kind of dive into all these topics in a couple minutes too as well. I won't just like briefly cover them. And also, you know, if your goal as an author or if your goal of this website is just to create a personal portfolio, then you know, use the website or build the website to showcase all of the things, all of your work that you've done. If you do coaching, if you do consulting or you're an artist or something like that, make sure you have places on your website designated to show off your work. And you know it'll expand over time. Even if you don't have a lot right now, if you're just looking for, like, a personal portfolio, you know, you can start out with a blog or start out with some sort of media posts. But, yeah, I mean, I'll. I'll dive into this in just a second. But I just wanted to overarch this whole presentation with just your main goal. I mean, the main thing you want to start to think about when you're building a website is what is your goal? Because this website is going to be a tool to help you accomplish that goal as an author. All right, so we already did the prizes. So for our first prize here, I want everyone just to kind of think back for a second. When did you last visit a website and it drew you, like, right in other than social media, other than Amazon, you're like, shopping, e commerce, ebay, all that kind of stuff. Like, when was the last time you actually went to a website? And you're like, oh, this is really cool. And it made you kind of go in and look around and explore more and learn more about what that website is. If you want to leave that website or whoever it was in the chat, I'll give a prize out to whoever's the first one. So, yeah, maybe it was an author or an influencer or somebody, just whoever you visited their site and you were immediately just like, wow, this is really cool. I kind of want to look further into this. So I'm sure everybody's thinking, could be like, apple.com. it could be, because I know they always got some cool stuff on there. It was a tour of the Pulitzer Museum. All right, I think Allen west is our winner. Is that the. Is that one of the, like, 3D tours you're talking about, Alan? Like, you go in you. It, like, takes you. It gives you a tour of a whole museum. But, yeah, the reason why I want to highlight this is because if you've ever been to a website like that and it's ever drawn you in, that's kind of what I'm going to be going over today. Because that. That's really what makes an effective website, is being able to draw people in right from the beginning. Yeah, Alan said exactly. Yeah. So those 3D tours are really cool. There's a lot of cool cameras that do that. I definitely follow all that kind of stuff. And that would draw me in too if I saw that. But yeah, I mean people's. It's kind of sad to say, but people's attention spans have been just decreasing because you know, they have access to so many content all over the, all over the Internet. So whenever somebody goes to a website, bounce rates are usually pretty high. Especially if people don't find what they're looking for immediately after visiting that website. Oh yeah, Sandy from Middle Tennessee. Yeah, so sorry I'm getting distracted by the comments, but that's what we want to do. So I'm going to kind of go into each little key element of the websites here and kind of highlight each one and maybe you can apply it to your own websites. So as it says in the description of this video, your website is your home base, right? So it should have everything that would, you know, help you accomplish your goals as an author. It should obviously have your purchase links to all the different retailers that your book's available at. You also want to have contact fields or a contact form so people can actually reach out to you on there. You want to have social media links so people, so people can find you there. And then this little megaphone in the top left here. I'm realizing that this wasn't probably the super, a very clear visual representation of what media is. But that's what I mean by media is like if you're ever interviewed on podcasts or like media outlets or TV interviews, anything like that, these are all things that you're going to want to have on your website. And it's, it's a tool like as a self published author you kind of need a home base to have and have a place to keep all of this data, all of these, all of these podcast interviews and links to buy your book and book descriptions and book cover images and a picture of you. Like if you go through a huge publisher, they're going to do a lot of promoting for you, right? They're going to use their resources and, and basically, you know, their skill sets and knowledge to promote themselves or promote your book for you. But as a self published author, you're promoting yourself. So having a website and having this tool to, you know, refer back to and continue to update is super critical in, you know, in your self published marketing. And you can incorporate your book cover into your website design for kind of a cohesive look and feel so that it all, so across all brands, across all platforms, your social media, your website and you know, people find you on Amazon, they're going to see your colors, your fonts, just your book. And they're going to recognize it. You know, they may not make that purchase right away, but they've seen all the branding of you and your book. So. So over time, it's just gonna reinforce you as an author and reinforce your credibility. So, yeah, I mean, I guess that's the overarching goal of having a website. So to summarize, what I'm kind of gonna get into here is that you should at least have the following pages on your website. So you wanna have a homepage which is just your main landing page that has links to all the other inside pages of the site, which. The inside pages are these other ones that are following after home. And you know, the homepage is the one that draws everybody in. You want to have. You want to have, you know, that place where you start directing people to. So if you're. So for Efren, Your website is efrendelgado.com I would imagine, so ruthlessly read. The average visit to a website is 15 seconds. Yeah, Liz, so that's actually, I would say 15 seconds is even high. That's, I would say around like five to seven seconds maybe. And usually people bounce after that if they don't find immediately what they're looking for. So, yeah, I won't get too sidetracked with that, but thanks for your comment, Liz. So if some. So what I was saying, if, if somebody, if you just shared your domain effort, delgado.com and people went to it, they're going to immediately see that homepage. That's the first thing they're going to see. So you don't want it to be really wordy. You don't want it to be confusing. You want it to be simple and to the point and draw people in. And, you know, you're kind of just like welcoming them into your home. And, you know, you want them to come in, you don't want them to just stop at the door, look inside and then leave. You want them to come in, you want to invite them in, show them that you can provide value. And yeah, I mean, that's the whole purpose of it. And I won't stick around too much on the homepage. And then the about the author page, that's going to be. You want a professional author bio and you want a professional author picture too, so people can see who it is that they're learning about. And then, yeah, your book page, you obviously want to have a book page as well. This is going to be. You want a nice 3D image of your book. You want to have your book description, the key points that your book's going to be targeting and the audience. And you want to target the audience that you're going for. I mean, that's all in. When you're publishing your book and you're writing it, you're trying to cater to that audience and obviously tell your story as well. But on your book page, you want to highlight that so that anybody who's visiting it can clearly see and quickly see that this is what your book's about and make a buying decision right then and there or, you know, contact you or subscribe to your newsletter to learn more or something like that before they actually make a purchase. And then a media or a blog page, you can have both. But media is just a place like what I was mentioning earlier, if you're ever on. Hey, Mike, if you're ever on podcast, interviews, TV interviews or anything like that, this is a place where you can kind of where you can host all of those things. And it's, it'll be. It'll become a collection over time of all the media outlets that you've ever been on. And it's just a great resource to have. So if anybody's looking to learn more about you and, and you know, learn more about what you have to say, they can just go to that page and see all of that. And it's kind of cool just to look back on the history of how you've grown over, over time. So it's just nice. And that's another awesome part of a website is the more and more that you keep updating it, the better and better it gets and the better you can organize it and then you can just look over time and see the improvements that you made. And like, not just in the website, but you as yourself, you as an author. So yeah, and then a contact page as well. Like this is something. If you do coaching or if you do consulting, anything like that. Like that is all great things to have a contact page, have a contact form so people can fill out an email. If you want people calling you or if you have a designated number for your business, you can do that. So, yeah, that's just to summarize. And then the next couple slides, I'm going to be going through the key elements to make your website stand out. And before this, I might go through and see if there's any questions that I can answer in this chat. Can see this chat's been blown up. I haven't really been Paying attention too much, not trying to get distracted. Let's see, Creating, creating that branding and keeping it consistent would be important, no? Yeah, Ron, creating branding and keeping consistent is super important. That's kind of what I was mentioning earlier about having a cohesiveness across all your brands. So you know, if you design your website around based off like what your book cover is, that's keeping your brand consistent. And then you can also extend that to your social media profiles and you can, you know, use those colors, use those fonts as like background photos or you know, profile pictures, all that kind of stuff. So keeping your brand consistent, obviously great. I mean with business, with business and with being a self published author, I mean it's kind of the same thing. So you want to have that brand cohesiveness across, across the board. Let's see. Mike, I have a website contact form, a proper pain full of spammers. Yeah, Mike, you want, might want to look doing some sort of like captcha, like for captcha for that form so that robots can't go in there. Yeah, that's, that's what I, yeah, Angela said try recaptcha as well. Yeah, so do that. Maybe it's the form that you're using. Maybe you want to experiment with some other ones. Okay, so back to my presentation here. Key elements to make your website actually stand out. So how to make a million dollars in 30 seconds. A strong headline. This is like number one. This is how you draw people in. I don't really think there is a stronger headline than how to make a million dollars in 30 seconds. If you think there would be, definitely drop it in the chat. I'd love to hear it. But yeah, I mean this would draw me in immediately if I was looking to make a million dollars really quickly. But I have an exam and I have a real life example of this next, in this next slide. But yeah, having a strong headline is going to be great. And, and like what I was saying, the five to seven seconds you have of somebody actually visiting your website, that that determines whether they stay or leave having a strong headline will, you know, be that difference maker if you. They should. Whoever visits your website should be able to see what your website is going to be about in that five to seven seconds. So if your book is a, I mean if you have a book about like sports or something, I mean I, I wouldn't be able to come up something totally at the top of my head but you know, have something as specific as possible to whatever sport that you're, that you're you know, going for specificity is key. And I know Julie will say this. I know that everybody else on our team will try and do this. That's what we do at Book Launchers. We try and get as specific as we can with your audience. So same deal with the strong headline. You want to be super specific and, but also not make it too wordy. It's, it's kind of a balancing act sometimes. But yeah. Here's an example of an author, Rachel Brown. I really like the way that her homepage is actually laid out. This is actually one that we made at Book Launchers. So her book is For Fork's Sake. It's about how she's a mother and about eating a plant based diet can basically change your life and for the better. And she kind of lays out in her book the multiple reasons that she can do this. So yeah, I mean the, her, her, her headline here, it's in big bold lettering. Heal yourself, Heal. Heal your family, Heal the planet. Eating a plant based diet can get you there pretty quickly. I mean this is like the first thing you see once you, once your website loads and you know there's a buy the book button and just that that headline immediately describes what it is that this book is about and probably what you're going to find if you look further into this website. So I mean if you look up at the top as well, we have a nice little publishing logo on the top left. And then we also have a very simple, easy to find and navigate navigation menu. And we have an as seen in page which is a page where all of her media will go, you know, as seen in, as seen in this podcast. As seen in this, you know, and then she has an about the author page, she has a book page, she has some plant based recipes. So that's like her own blog that she continually updates and posts about and it's all related to her book. She has a consulting page and that is, you know, she does consulting for her work, for her plant based work and she has a contact page. So I would say, I mean right off the bat here, anybody who's going to visit this for the very first time and they're interested in, you know, maybe converting over into a plant based diet, they're going to immediately see value here, right? Like they, it won't be everybody. Like when you're, when you're trying to draw people in, you're not going to draw every single person in who visits your website, right? There are going to be those guys who, who or those People who will visit your website and you know it's not for them, they'll check it out, be like, oh, this looks nice, but it's not for me. I don't really need anything here. But for the people who are, you know, looking for this specific type of book or this specific type of lifestyle, then, you know, that's why being specific is, is the best thing you can do because if you can get in front of them and draw them in immediately, that just helps your case and also provides value for them too because they're somebody that you, they would want to connect with or you're somebody that they would want to connect with. So another key element of your author website is a professional photo and bio as well. So this would be like preferably on your be on your homepage but also on the about the author page. I pulled this from Brene Brown's website. She's obviously a really prevalent author and I'm sure a lot of authors kind of look to her for like references in their own marketing and stuff because she does so well. But I think this is just a great example of a very simple about the author page. It's, it's got a great picture of her and then on the left side just a very simple, just this is who I am really quickly. And then you know, she goes in deeper down, down low. But like immediately, if this is the first page that somebody visited on the site, they could easily see. Oh, okay, cool. I'm just gon learn more about Brene Brown and yeah, it's. And also like when you, when you upload a picture to the, to the website, don't use like a flip phone picture from you know, 1998. Make sure that you have something high res and that you have something like it looks good and you can do a really professional photo. You can do like you in a shirt and tie or you in a nice dress or you can do more like lifestyle photos like this. Like Brene Brown here. It's kind of a combo of both. Like it looks really, looks really nice. It's a high quality photo. But she's like in casual clothes and looks like she's like in her backyard or something. So it all comes back to your goals and how you want to be portrayed. And you know, if you want to be more casual and more personable, then yeah, take an afternoon with a couple friends and a camera and take a few lifestyle shots and you know, just, just a few nice pictures. Go a long way with a website because you only have so Much space to work with, really. Like people aren't going to be scrolling for hours looking through all your content. They're just, you know, it's just going to be a couple of pixels on a page and if you can populate that with really nice looking pictures, then yeah, it makes all the difference. Especially if that's the kind of audience that you're going for. And that's the, you know, if your goal is to be a personable person, take a drink real quick. Okay. All right. Yes. Key elements to clone on your websites. Cover and book description. So everybody out there who has a beautiful book cover and you want to put it on your website, definitely get a really nice picture of it. A nice 3D image looks great on a page with all the, and we're, you know, we're utilizing this extra white space to get this, to get this to pop out on, you know, on a white page. It's a, like a light blue book and we have a huge heading at the very top. That's the subtitle of the book that quickly, you know, tells the visitor what it is that they're getting into, what they're looking for. Ron says, how long should the bio be? I mean, on the back of your book it's only what, like a paragraph or something? So on your website, I mean, it's, it's completely up to you. I wouldn't make it too, too long. Like probably two, maybe three paragraphs. I would say for an author biology, it doesn't have to be super long. But yeah, this is, this is like your cover and book description here. This is something you would want on your book page. And you know, this is what you want to highlight in there. So as I'm going through, we have the home page, the about the author page and the book page. They all have their own purpose. They're all different. They're all in different locations on the website. They're not all on one page listed down. So I just wanted to kind of clarify that. And yeah, it's also, it's good to have all of these organized in such a ways because one, it's, it makes it easy for anybody visiting your website to find all of these things because it'll be up in the navigation menu. And two, every single time you create a new page on your website, that's another opportunity for you to rank on search engines. Right. So, and you know, you can use, I won't get a ton into SEO, but you know, you can use metadata. Metadata, you can use all your headings you can use keywords inside of your, inside of your actual content to get your, to get your pages ranking higher on Google and having those extra pages help with that. Okay, and obviously I've already mentioned this a couple times, but another key element to have on your website is links to buy your book. These images right here, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, get it on Apple Books. All I did was I just googled Amazon logo white and I went to Google Images and I saved that image and I put it on my website or put it on this, on this PowerPoint here. It's, it's as simple as that. You can just do little like buy the book on Amazon and then do like a hyperlink or something. But honestly, I think the logos look really good and it's, it's a lot easier than you think to put it on there. Yeah, so I just, you know, download those from the Internet, put them up on there and, and link those images to the retailer sites. Okay, looks like we got a couple questions here. So, Alan West, Angela. Would having picks without title words work for a landing page? Would having pics without title words work for a landing page? I'm not sure what you mean by that, Alan. Like having pics, are you saying like just having a picture without like labeling it or anything or just like, just like scattering pictures around the website? Okay, and then Efren, what do we have for Efren? My website bio is a bit long, but my goal is to illustrate credibility. Seems like a paradox. It's okay that your website bio is a bit long. You can break it up throughout the page like you can just like that's, that's what I would do. If somebody sent me a, an author bio and it was like, you know, two pages long. What I would do is I would stretch it out through the whole page. Don't just have it in one big text blurb. So that, because nobody's really going to read that, what you're going to want to do is put it in bite sized chunks and that's where you would want to have some, some great photos of yourself. You'd want to have, you know, a picture of you and then a little like one paragraph of your bio there and then you scroll down a little bit. Then maybe it's reversed the, the pictures on this side or the pictures on this side and then the, the rest of the bios here and just kind of go down like that so it looks nicer on the page. It's cleaner. You utilize white space and make it a lot More easy to digest. And Alan says yes, perhaps one single photo of artwork to create an experience before they get to the end. Okay, yeah, I think Angela's right. I'll probably answer some more questions at the end just so I don't go too far off track here because I do have a couple more important parts that I want to get into. So another key element to have on your website is a lead magnet. So this is going back to again, your goal as an author, your number one, you know, reason of like why you should have a website and like the number one goal that you want to achieve with this website. So if your goal is to generate a email list or some sort of community for your book and for your topic, then you're going to want to provide some value to anybody who visits your website. I just put this example here. This is a lead magnet that we use at Book launchers. This is like, it's proven to be really useful. Download our 7 Steps to Writing a Non Fiction Book. Julie has written an entire book about how to, how to publish how to self publish a book, right? So she's got a multitude of things that she can possibly write about. And if you're writing a book, I can imagine that you have a multi, multitude of things that you could probably write about as well. So try and pick something that isn't in your book that you think can provide a quick win to anybody who's visiting your website. So you know, if like going back to my sports example, I'm just holding a tennis ball. So if you wrote a book about tennis and you wrote a book about, you know, how, how to become a pro tennis player, you may not have included in that book the three best exercises that you use to get in shape in, you know, 30 days time that is a really specific and digestible, I guess little quick tip that anybody would find would get value out of, right? Like if they were a tennis player and they were looking to get better and they visited your website, that's like, oh, I just need, I've. There's three exercises right here I can get. All I have to do is exchange my email. Yeah, like no brainer. Absolutely. That's a very like simple example and kind of like just off the top of my head, but it's, it's really as simple as that. Just having, just providing some sort of value for anybody visiting. That's all. It's, it's a, it's a give and take relationship. You know, you give them valuable content and you also give them or you, you get their email address in return. When you think about, if you think about the website more as like a sales tool, then you know it's not really going to be as successful as you probably think it's going to be. You want to think about it more as building relationships and think about it more as inviting people to come in rather than, you know, selling them on you. You want to just invite them in, you know, bring them in, make them coffee. I guess that's my analogy there, but here, let me keep on going. So common, common mistakes to avoid when making a website is don't use too many colors or fonts, make sure that your website is mobile friendly and you want to avoid clutter and keep your website easy to navigate. So, yeah, I mean there's. These are just rule of thumb things. A lot of people don't think about it but until like after the website's actually made. But I actually put some examples in here, like, don't do this. Like, this is extremely wordy. And anybody who looks at this, they're probably not. I just pulled this image off Google Images. I don't know whose website this is, but there's so many things going on here. It's all words broken up in a little grid, sessions. And there's actually a session over here that says how to, to use this website. Like, if you have to specify on your website this is how you use this website, it's probably not. You're probably doing something wrong because it should be really easy. Everybody knows how to use websites nowadays. Like you should, you should definitely not have anything too wordy like this. That's why what I was just telling Efren you wanted to section things out. If you have a lot of content, if you have a lot of things to put on your website, you know, mix in some pictures and kind of make it look nicer on the page and just make it a lot easier to digest at all. Like, it's not a big newspaper. You don't want to just like cram it all into columns and make it look weird. And here's an example of how a website would look if you didn't optimize it for mobile devices. So, you know this, you probably on a desktop, this heading would have looked really good and you probably have it at like a hundred pixels or something. But a lot of people don't take the time to look at how it's going to look on your phone. So, you know, you can see all the text is wrapping and you can kind of read it, but like, it just, it just looks like a poor job. It doesn't really look very good. So make sure that whenever you're building a website, send the link to your phone and like check it out from there. So that's a quick little trick that I use all the time. I'll check it on a tablet and mobile device as well and you know, I'll check it on multiple different screen sizes. You can drag your, your screen size like, you know, to whatever size you want it to be. And usually a lot of builders have that functionality as well that you can make sure that it looks good. Okay, so now we're getting into like website building tools and as I, as I was saying earlier, this isn't a tutorial on how to build website. I'm just going to kind of show you some ways that you could build a website and show you some tools that you could start going into. So here are some like beginner friendly tools here. So we have Squarespace. You probably, you guys have probably heard, heard of some of these. Squarespace, Kajabi, bluehost, Weebly list goes kind of on and on. These are all like, they're not WordPress sites. They are just regular, you know, basic website builders. You can pay a small fee and they will, you can build a website with them and host it on their servers. So this is if you're just starting out, if you're just looking to do like a very basic site, I would recommend probably, you know, Kajabi or bluehost is pretty good. Squarespace wix. I haven't really had a lot of experience in either of those, but I've heard that they're pretty decent. But these are just some examples. And then how I build all my websites and how we build all of our websites at Book launchers is through WordPress. And WordPress is, I think, you know, the best way to actually build a website mainly because I'm just, you know, trained, I'm working with them. But Also Google ranks WordPress sites higher because they are blog websites. Right? So they, and Google just prefers blog websites because they're regularly updated. And I don't know, that's just kind of how their algorithms were built out just so that WordPress websites are favored and WordPress websites are created by purchasing any of these. These are all hosting companies. So Flywheel is probably my number one recommended one I would say. And then you have SiteGround, you have Bluehost. I mean there's, there's so many of them that offer WordPress hosting. But you can't just go to, like, WordPress.com and start a website from there. You actually have to go to one of these hosting providers and buy their WordPress hosting so that, you know. Because the WordPress website won't actually exist until you get the hosting for it. I won't go too far into that, but that's essentially how that works. But if you're just looking to get started, I'll go back to this. This is kind of take note of these. This is what you want to get started with. Okay. And then last minute tips. Remember your goals as an author and try to build a website that will help accomplish those goals. And if you're not sure on something, look up a YouTube video. You're on YouTube right now. But if you are, you know, really having a tough time building your website, this is one of those markets, this is one of those things that is extremely saturated. Like, a lot of people are doing tutorials on how to use Wix, on how to use Squarespace, on how to use WordPress. If you're totally lost and totally dumbfounded on how to do this website, you can just, you know, look up YouTube University. YouTube University isn't really a real place. I just, I just. That's just what I call it because I go there to learn stuff all the time. But yeah, you'd be really amazed at how much you would actually get from that. Okay. And then the last thing that I want to go over today is what did I say? This is for a prize, by the way. What did I say was the first thing that you should think of before building a website? You can drop it in the comments. I know it was a while ago. We've been on this live for like 40 minutes, but anybody remember the very first thing you should think of before you start building your website? No, it's. It's not considered audience. Mike Close. Yes, Efren. Efren is the winner. Author goals, the very first thing you want to think about before building a website. I just want to kind of do an overarching theme to this presentation is you want to consider what your goals as an author is. So you want to really focus on, you know, if you want to get sales, do you want to build an email list or do you want it to be a personal portfolio or something else? Those are just kind of the top three. But what is it that you want to accomplish? And then start building your website with that in mind? Okay. Mike said I joined too late. Sorry, Mike. Okay, so yes, Angela says we have A couple questions and I'm popular. Thank you. So yeah, let me, I'm just going to remove this and I'll just put me on the screen and. Yeah, Angela, do I just scroll back and look up the questions or. Hang on one sec. I think Angela might be compiling the questions here. Drink some water. I've been talking for a while. Thank you all for hanging in here for so long though. I really appreciate it. Really appreciate all the support here. Question 1 effort thoughts on a 30 second welcome video. 100 definite yes. Welcome videos are, are amazing. It's a really great way to, to draw people in and just make sure that you know, when you do a 30 second video you have a headline at the very top of the video describing what that video is going to be about because you're not going to do like an autoplay. Autoplay is obvious. They don't rank well on Google and it's just kind of annoying. Most people like if, if somebody visits a website and it immediately starts blasting a video at their face, they usually just leave. Bounce rates have been, usually been pretty high. So I would say definitely 30 second video is going to be a really powerful thing to have. Question 2 Phela. Most websites have a white background. Is it, is this the best color scheme for engagement? I would say, I mean there's a reason why a lot of people use white backgrounds, right? Just because it's simple, it's just a clean backdrop and it's very, it doesn't have a lot of distractions, right. So I wouldn't say that it's like been scientifically proven that it's the best color scheme for engagement, but the more colors that you use, the more distracting it can get. So what I would do is if you do want to use colors, you know, stick with like two or three and kind of scatter those around the site and if you don't want white as your background, use like a little bit of like an off white. But no, I wouldn't say that it's the best color scheme for engagement. It's just standard practice with a website. That's, that's just kind of why it's just, it's easy to see and you know, that's probably what I would say about that. And Efren, I would say yes, do a pop up video but just don't. But sorry. Yes, do a pop up video but just make sure you put a title at the top explaining what the video is about or like introducing yourself first. Yeah, no problem. Fail. I'm glad it Helped. Question three. I'm going back to Allen's. I think he means having a picture on the home landing page first and then having the headline lower down. Yeah, I mean, that's fine. You, you also, you want to think when you're doing something like that, like what. What Alan is asking is if it's. If it's better if it's okay to have like a picture first and then a head down below. So I think that's totally fine. But when you're building out the website, just make sure that it's. If you're putting a picture, don't have just the picture. Like, if the website loads and the only thing a person sees is that picture and nothing else, they're probably going to be a little bit confused. Right. They're not going to know what the website is or what. What it is you're trying to accomplish. They have to scroll down to figure out what it is. So there's a term in web design called above the fold, which is what a user sees. It's the first paint that a user sees right when your website loads. So if you want to put an image first, that's totally fine, but I would definitely recommend looking at the sizing of that image and making sure that there's still room for a title at the bottom there. Okay. Question for Martin. Can it be a chapter from the book or is that not recommended? That's a good question, Martin. I would say I think that's a pretty standard lead magnet. I wouldn't say it's like a strong lead magnet and it's not like, recommended. I wouldn't say it's not recommended. Like, people do it all the time, but. But I don't really think it's a very strong way to start collecting email addresses. I would think of something a little bit more creative when it comes to that. And like, not saying, like, you definitely can do it and you got to get the files and PDF files or whatever to have it delivered. But yeah, I would try and think of something a little bit more creative than just the chapter of the book. I would try and provide some sort of value because people don't really just give away their email addresses nowadays. You know, they want some sort of quick win. They want something like that. And like, free trials are so oversaturated. And it's kind of essential what you're doing. You're giving a free trial of your book. So, I mean, I would say look into the, the content of your book and try and pry out some, like, Quick tips and tricks that, that you can provide to somebody. Okay, yeah, no problem, Alan. Thank you. Question 5, Efren, can we edit the PC laptop version to not affect the mobile phone version and vice versa? Yes, actually you can. So this would be. Actually, Efron, I helped you set up a website on Divi, so I know for a fact that your builder actually does work with that. So what I would do is look up a quick YouTube video. You know, that would be YouTube university time. I. It would take me, it would be very tech. It'd be a little bit too technical for me to just explain with no visual aids here. So I would say, yeah, I mean, at the very bottom left of the screen, you should be able to choose which screen size it is and you should be able to adjust for each individual screen size. And last question here, Shane. Any tips for the new Google Analytics update, please? Okay, so the new Google Analytics update, I'm not specifically sure the kind of updates that it really took. The updates that it did. I know that it did update because I had to update a lot of websites from Google Analytics, Universal analytics to Google Analytics 4. I'm not sure specifically what the changes were, but if you're wondering about switching, switching over from Universal analytics to Google Analytics, there should be like a YouTube video or something on it. But any new tips on it? I don't really think they're going to be changing too much. Changing what? Their algorithms are too much. I think they're kind of just doing like an update refresh type of deal. But also, you know, I haven't really done much research on it, so I'm sorry, I can't really give you a lot of insight into it. Thanks for the question though. Okay, well, cool. I think that's it for questions. I really appreciate everybody's time and coming on here and joining me for the last hour or so. Thank you so much. And we are going to have a deep dive on AI, I believe with Julie on April 15th and. And after this video is posted, I believe we're going to be giving away some prizes to the first people who comment afterwards. So. So yeah, thank you everybody again for, for popping on and. And maybe we'll see you next time. See you later everybody.