An Author’s Guide to Building Your Online Platform
So, you’ve written your book and it has been published. You have a team of dedicated marketers who are promoting your work to the press, to book stores and getting in touch with other vital contacts. With all that in mind, what’s there left for you to do now? If you haven’t already then you should develop an online platform for yourself.
An online platform doesn’t just mean having a website these days. Obviously a website will help you on your way, but there’s other internet resources you should be using to your advantage as well. To help you on your way we have very kindly created a guide to building your online platform. Everything you need to know is below!
Website
Creating a website doesn’t have to be complex, or expensive. You can simply use a blogging platform such as wordpress.com, blogger.com or tumblr.com to create a web page – this can be done completely free, if you don’t mind having .wordpress.com at the end of your website name.
If you want to create a domain name you will be charged, but this is relatively inexpensive. Wordpress allows you to purchase domain names directly on their website, which makes life a lot simpler.
Once you have a blank website it’s now time to fill it up with content. As an author this content should be about yourself, your book and anything else that you think is relevant!
Social media is crucial in developing a platform for yourself as an author. Twitter is essentially a giant forum, where you can engage with reader communities that you might not have even known existed and reach out to potential book buyers. You can also interact directly with the people who have already read your book. It takes about five minutes to set up a Twitter account and once you’ve made it, it’s up to you to start updating your statuses and reaching out to potential readers. For more tips on this see our ‘6 Top Tips for Twitter’.
Email marketing, is another tactic that can be put into action at absolutely no cost. With Mail Chimp you can send 12,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers completely free. These aren’t just text emails, but html emails, which you can brand, upload images to and make look as professional as possible. How do you get people subscribing to your emails I hear you ask? Well this is where integrated marketing comes in. Having already developed a website and a Twitter you should be starting to gradually gain an internet presence, so you put subscribe links onto your website and post them on twitter targeting those people already interested. YouTube Video marketing is the future (and the present according to a lot of marketers), so what better way to promote your book than creating a YouTube channel for yourself? This will allow you to vlog about your book, about upcoming events and even hold Q and A’s with your readers so they can find out what they want about the book. Once again to gain optimum viewing on your YouTube Channel you’ll want to share your videos on your website, twitter and even on your emails! There you have it - your guide to building an online platform. It’s simple to do and surprisingly fun.