10 Pages You Should Include in Your Author Website

This is episode 34 of Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to Author Audience where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. Today I'm rolling out the red carpet and inviting you to join me as I share all about the pages you should have on your author website. My name is Shelly Hitz and I love being able to offer the content to you on this podcast each week. Oh, but I have just been crazy busy this last couple months and you may have noticed, especially the last month, a lot of my episodes have been interview episodes. And that's just simply because I have been so focused on so many projects. This last week I published a new book, the 90 Day Writing Journal. So fun. It's a print book, spiral bound. You can find it on Amazon. And I also launched my sales page for coloradowritingretreat.com so, so excited about this. Found an amazing chalet in the Rocky Mountains that I'm renting in September and I'm gonna have a small group come and get some writing done with me. But wow, it has been really busy and really crazy. So I'm glad to be back with you on this episode to really teach you and train you on this topic of websites because I believe you have a God given message to share with the world. And the question is, are you ready to shine?

It's time for this week's Center Stage Spotlight Training. This is where I share training and strategies to help you grow your business or ministry through writing and publishing books, marketing online and creating products and services to sell. On the back end. I'm not just about books, but so much more. I'm here to help you connect with your audience in the best way possible. In today's episode is all about your website. It's episode 34 titled 10 Pages yous Should Include in youn Author Website. I know this is gonna help bring you one step closer to getting your message to more people. So be prepared to shine.

If you've been following me for a while, you know I talk about the promotion pyramid. It's actually a training that you can download for free@ProMotionPyramid.com and in that you will discover the three things every author needs to have as part of their marketing plan. Well, one of those is your website. And so that's what I'm going to be Talking about today is your author website. Now, what should the main goal of your author website be? It should be to connect with your readers and build a relationship where they grow to know, like and trust you. This is the basis of all marketing, is building that relationship. But before we get into the strategy of the pages you should include on your website, please just breathe. Ready? Let's breathe together.

Because remember, you don't have to do this alone. You don't have to figure out every single technical part of having a website. A lot of you are creatives and so that means you excel in being creative in writing and publishing. And this part of the technology may overwhelm you. And if so, consider outsourcing this. You can hire someone, you can find a volunteer or even barter services with another author. But don't skip this part just because it feels overwhelming. Find a way to accomplish your goals. So what pages should you include? Well, I recommend first of all having a self hosted WordPress website that is a complete training in itself. And I teach that within authoraudienceacademy.com if you want a training specifically on that and how to set it up. But once you have your website, then you can have on a self hosted WordPress site you can have pages and you can have blog posts. So you can have two different types of information on your website.

But what I want you to think about is when you're creating these static pages, and that's what I'm going to be talking about today. I'm not talking about blogging or blog posts, I'm talking about static pages on your website. You want to ask yourself this question. What is the main purpose of each page? For example, if you are having someone to come to your page for your email list, the main purpose is to get them to sign up. So you don't necessarily want to have like three different things on that page, you just want to have that one thing. You want it to be as simple as possible. Because a common phrase in marketing is that a confused mind, see says no. So if somebody comes to your website, they're navigating around, they get confused, they don't know where to find things, they can't find where your book is or how to contact you or something like that. They'll just click away, they'll leave. So you want to make it simple, you want to make it easy for them to navigate. And I want to talk to you about 10 pages that you could include on your website. So the first is your homepage. This is the first place they'll land shellyhits.com you'll see. It's actually a page that lists snippets of my blog post. Right now. Eventually I want to change that and make it into something that's a little more strategic, with calls to action to different areas of my blog and my website. But for right now, that's what I have. Now, if you look on trainingauthors.com which is also a website I own, there's four different categories on the main page, and it leads you to different areas of the website that's at the top. And then at the bottom are snippets of the most recent blog post. There's other times when you may just want to have a static page as your landing page and direct someone to where to go on your website. So there's so many different ways to do this, but that's the first page you'll want to set up. The second page is your about page. And this is probably the most frequented page on your website is your about page. But you know what I find? I find a lot of authors just kind of throw something together with a bio. And I have to admit I have done that for years as well. But your about page should be engaging. You should tell some stories, you should include some things that it's about your reader and not just about who you are. And I spent some time, some significant time this last year and a half really working on my about page. It is a work in progress. I still have a lot to continue to work on and improve in it. But you can see what I've done@shellyhits.com about the third page you should have on your website are pages for each of your books. So if you have one book, then you would simply have one book page. If you have multiple books like I do, so then you would have multiple books. And I have so many books, I have over 40 right now. And so I use the My Book Table plugin. It makes it a lot easier to organize and a lot easier for me to add pages to my website. So you can check out how I do it with that plugin@shellyhits.com bookshelf now, on the training authors.com site, we just use static pages for the book page. So if you go to trainingauthors.com books, it will have a list of all of my books for authors, and it leads to a static page. The links lead to a static page where we've created standalone pages for each of our books. And so this is something you can look at as well. You don't need a plugin, you don't need anything fancy. You can just create a static page on your WordPress blog for your book pages. So you can see how that's done@trainingauthors.com books the fourth page you want on your website is a contact page. It's really interesting. I do a lot of platform reviews for authors and some authors actually forget to add a contact page. And I recommend highly that instead of just having your email on that page that you include a contact form. This is to help to decrease spam that would eventually come to your email address. But you definitely need a contact page. You can see my contact page@shellyhits.com contact I have my mailing address. I have a number where meeting organizers and such can call me. I have a contact form so you can see kind of how I set it up there. But you just need a way for people to contact you. The fifth page you should include is a landing page for your email list. Sign up I personally am using lead pages now and so if you go to PromotionPyramid.com, you'll see one of my lead pages or if you go to shellyhits.com free training you'll see one of my lead pages. But on trainingauthors.com we had always done it just with one a static page on WordPress. And so if you go to trainingauthors.com newsletter you'll see it's still. I haven't upgraded it to a lead page. It's still a page, a static page on WordPress. So you can do it as simple as that. Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. But it should be a dedicated page to your email list sign and it should not just be in the sidebar of your navigation of your website shouldn't just be a link on the top, it should have its own dedicated page. The sixth page you should include is a disclaimer or legal page. You can see what I include on my legal page@shellyhits.com legal-information this is really important in the day and age we live that you have this information about your privacy policies, your, you know, an FTC statement if you're an affiliate, a Amazon affiliate statement if you are an affiliate for Amazon and so forth so that you have your. Your bases are covered and you have that information there. The seventh page you should include is a resources page. Apart from your about page, your resources page will be one of the highest visited pages on your website. And this is a great place to include affiliate links for. For additional income. You can see my resources page for training authors@trainingauthors.com resources and we break it up into different sections. But for ShellyHits.com, i've actually done something different. When I turned 40 in 2015, I decided to do several posts all about the number 40. And so I did 40 plus tools I use in my business almost every day. So. So that has actually become the page that I've really used as my resource page on that site. I may eventually do an official like resources page, but whatever you do, make sure you have a page where you can compile all the resources and the things that you recommend for your target audience. The eighth page is a blog landing page. So a place where you have people. Can you just send people and say here's the link for my blog. Like I said on my shellyhits.com page, it's actually my homepage. So those two pages are actually combined for me on that site. On training authors, we have a specific landing page. It's trainingauthors.com blog and that's where you can get all of the recent blog posts on that site. So it may be a page that is also your homepage, it may be a separate page, but you want something where you can send people to to get your most recent blog post. If you're a blogger, the ninth page that you should include is events. Now this is for speaking events, it's for podcast interviews, it's for, you can include where you've been a guest blogger, those types of things, and you can include a page specifically for that. For shellyhits.com, i am using currently a theme by Michael Hyatt called the Get Notice theme. Which one of the things I really liked about this theme is it has a built in feature for events. So if you go to shellyhits.com events then you will be able to see all of my events that I have coming up. I don't really use that page specifically, but what I do use is I use the widget which puts all those events in my sidebar automatically or automagically like I like to say. So that's one thing I like about this particular theme. Now you can just do your events on your own. You can just create it on a blog post and announce that you'll be speaking somewhere and then put the link to that blog post in your sidebar. So you can do it manually too. But that's Just the way I'm doing it currently. And then the 10th page that I recommend having is a media page. Even if you're not planning on doing a ton of speaking or a ton of interviews, you'll really want to have this page. This page will have a link to your media kit. It will have your media kit, will have your headshot, your bio, you know, things like that that people can use for guest blogging, for interviews. And it's just really nice to have that information on your site. If you ever get into big time media, all that stuff will be ready and it will be there for those looking for it. I currently have a page on my site shellyhits.com media-room and you can go to that and you can feel free to model your page after mine. I start off with my media kit and that's just a link to download that. Then I have my upcoming appearances, I have press releases and that's really great. If you're doing some press releases to highlight certain things you're doing, you can include those on your media page as well. Select media appearances. Select. So then I have a place for previous live appearances, media appearances like television, radio and so forth. And then I have a place where I've had published articles because I have been published on a couple bigger sites. Then I have my online appearances, podcast, interviews, videos, and then I just share them, a podcast host and link to my podcast. And then at the end I have two calls to action. Find out more about Shelly hits here. Click here to invite Shelly to speak at your event. And so that's how I've set mine up. You can make yours as simple as you want. It can simply start with the first media appearance you've had online. Just put a link to that and then include maybe a little bio at the end so it doesn't look so bare. But I really think every author should have some form of media page because that really is going to be helpful when you start to get some publicity or as you get interviews in the future. So remember, your website should be about your reader, not about you. It should add tons of value and you want to use a call to action on every page. So a call to action is telling them what to do next. You sign up for my newsletter and get my free training here. Invite me to speak at your next event here. You know, have a call to action on every page. And I am so excited that I'm going to be able this month in Author Audience Academy to put together a seven day website makeover challenge. This is a challenge you can start at any time. But if this is something you really need, you need some help. Not just, it's not going to be just about the pages, this going to be about the overall strategy of your website, your navbar, your email, sign up, your content that you're giving on your website, your navigation and so, so much more. And so I invite you to join us. Not only will you get access to this challenge, you'll get access to all the archived workshops and challenges in the past, all the training, an amazing, amazing community in our Facebook group. So come over and join us@authoraudienceacademy.com and I would love to to take you through that challenge this month on your website. And just having a website makeover. Lights, camera, action. Are you ready for this week's take action tip? This week's tip is to go through the 10 different pages I've given to you. If you want to have them as a resource and download the show notes as a PDF. So, so that you don't have to take furious notes or listen to this again, just go over to authoraudience.com 34, that's the number 34. And you'll get access to all of this and all of the 10 pages so that you can have them whenever you need them. What I want you to do is I want you to look at those 10 pages and decide which ones do you already have, which ones do you need to add, and then which ones do you need to improve. So you'll be listing three different things. The pages you already have, the pages you don't have at all yet, and then any page that you feel you really need to improve and just make that list. That's your take action tip. And then what you'll do is you'll take that list and start writing out your to do list. You know, what pages do you want to add first, what pages do you want to optimize and so forth and just prioritize and go from there. And like I said, I would love to help you walk through this step by step in my 7 day website makeover challenge and you can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com and I look forward to seeing you inside.

Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week's Godly gains segment, which is all about keeping Christ at the center of all we do. Because in the end it's not about us, it's about him and the scripture I've chosen for the Godly gain segment this week comes from Hebrews 13:14.

For this world is not our permanent home. We are looking forward to a home yet to come. And that home is heaven. But I was thinking about this because I often tell authors that your website site is your online home. It's your home base. It's where you can just tell people to go and they can find what they need to find about you and your books and your business or your ministry. It's your online home. And it's so great to spend time creating and optimizing that online home. But if you're a Christ follower or Christian, we have another more permanent home to look forward to. And that's heaven here on Earth. This world, it's not our permanent home, but we are looking forward to a home yet to come. So although we work on these things, we do what we can to reach people with the messages God has given to us, to share our gifts with the world. It's just a good reminder sometimes, just to simply remember this is not, not all there is. There is so much more when you have confessed Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. And if you have questions about what that relationship with Jesus looks like, please feel free to contact me@shelleyellehits.com I'd love to talk with you more about that.

It's my hope and my goal that these episodes are bringing you one step closer. Closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. I'm excited to see you make it happen. I'm so proud of you. You are a light shining in the darkness. And there truly ain't no mountain high enough. There ain't no technology that can stop you. When you truly decide that this is what God has called you to do, this is the message you have to share with the world. And I'm so excited to hear what you do with your author.

I want to ask you a quick favor. If you have gotten any value from my websites, would you mind just taking 30 seconds and posting your rating and review on itunes? It lets me know that you're here, that you're listening, and it also helps me to reach more people and to have even more people find out about this podcast. Get the training and get the equipping and the motivation they need to take that next step. So I truly appreciate you. And if you do post a review, make sure to email me@contactellehits.com with your screenshot because I will send you my course procrastination to publication. A $47 value for free. Thank you so much for joining me in this episode, and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.