The Benefits of Author and Speaker Websites

Having a website using your name can help authors and speakers in the following ways:

1. Provides a place for people to learn about you and your books and purchase your books.
2. Can be a place for you to share excerpts from your books or possibly a place to test content for new books.
3. You can combine social media and other marketing strategies to boost your online presence.

A website is essential for speakers to get booked.

Key Points

• The website can present you, your work, your mission, and any upcoming projects.
• -The website can also serve as a platform to breathe new life into older works by presenting excerpts.
• An author-speaker website is a great space to build your online presence, authority, and influence.
• A website offers marketing opportunities, can boost your search engine presence, and enables you to sell your books directly.
• Having a book can serve as a gateway to speaking gigs, boosting your credibility and attracting invites to be on podcasts.

I am available to create an author-speaker website for you.

Come learn more about Shared Visions Unlimited at https://sharedvisions.com/

Transcript

So, happy Saturday, everyone. I'm Greg Dixon, your Chief Enabler for Shared Visions Unlimited, and welcome to this program.

I'm calling it  Your Writing for Fun Adventure.

The idea of your Writing for Fun was I wanted to encourage you to embrace your inner writer and write anything. It could be a book, could be articles, could be poems, could be screenplays, could be anything at all. 

And a lot of good things happen when you write. 

So, that was the purpose of the Writing for Fun adventure. And today, on Saturdays, I've been setting up, hoping to have a group discussion. Maybe at some point I'll get an expert screenwriter or songwriter to come in and talk about their experience and what they're doing. 

Anyway, so far, it's just me today. 

So, I have prepared a little bit of a discussion, and the main topic here is the benefits of an author-speaker website. So, if you're thinking about becoming an author, you're working on a book or anything, there's an advantage to having a website branded just for you. So, it'd just be your name, like, I don't know, whatever, Gregory Allen Dixon, just to use my example. I hope there's not another one out there. 

But anyway, whatever your name is, that's the simplest way, because it can be a, even if you have a company, you have a multi-million dollar, multi-billion dollar company, more than one company with all their company websites, it's worthwhile as an author or a speaker to have a website in your name. 

I'm just going to run through some of the benefits here. For one, present you and your books. So, you have a profile of yourself, you list your books, of course, with links for people to purchase them in whatever form you're selling them. Could be an Audible book, could be, well, actually, we encourage people to have it in all formats, including print books, eBooks, maybe a digital edition of it, and Audible. 

So, but start, you know, most people start with a print book, and it's easy enough once you have the print book to create a eBook out of it. So, there we go. And what are you going to put on your website? Well, you're going to have a profile of you, you know, your mission, what your personal mission is, and your books. You can also, I suggest, use a blogging website, like WordPress, but you could use other platforms. 

My preference is WordPress, and you could have excerpts of your book. Maybe you even have published a number of books, and they're gathering dust and not really doing anything. You can breathe new life into it with a website. 

So, you present excerpts, and I've been running an experiment. I started a book called All My Relations, and I'm writing it live as a website, because a website is a publishing medium itself, and the purpose is to get people to read what your articles, especially if you have a bunch of stories, and each one's self-contained, each chapter is really a new story, then a website's perfect for that. And that later, you can take that, edit it, and put it into a book, print it in a book, and get it out there, get it up there for forever. It's, you know, a print book is, and a digital book on Amazon or other places, it will outlive you. 

So, if that's what you want to do, then that you could start by testing your content out on a website. If nobody engages with it, then, you know, maybe it's not going to be a bestseller, but it's also a great place to build your online presence, authority, and influence. 

Betty Withrow and I say that the time to start marketing your book is as soon as you have had a title, and we always advocate creating a landing page for your book right away. 

So, it might as well be an author website, so you can start getting people engaged, excited about the book that's coming up, if you want to do. And with the online presence, authority, and influence, I'm also, in the title of this, 

I also talk about a speaker website. 

I'm involved with a group of people who want to be keynote speakers and be invited to speak at events, for companies, or on various occasions. The main thing for being a speaker, a professional speaker, is to have a good place where people can get your portfolio, learn about your topics, and all that kind of thing. And again, it's building your online presence, authority, and influence. 

From a marketing point of view, I leverage blog posts with social media posts and video posts like this to create a kind of synergy between them, get you listed on search engines really well, and get you out there. 

And in a week, you can establish quite a lot of presence using social media, YouTube, and website, and blog posts. So again, as I mentioned, nothing else you can sell your books. 

I've met a couple of authors recently who said they had a book, but I can't find anywhere online to find out about the book or purchase it. It's sort of like an inside thing. If you go behind the green door, then you might find this book, but you don't have to be the world's best-kept secret. You can have a website that's searchable and findable. People can find your book and buy it. So that's good. 

And again, from marketing, even when you're promoting your book, you can also say you're available for speaking gigs. So, one of the requirements to get speaking gigs is generally to have a book, which opens doors for speaking gigs. So it's a good excuse, right? You can send out a note to podcasters and say, oh, I'm launching a new book on marketing or whatever it is, on the best whatever it is that you do, and says, I'd love to be a guest on your podcast. 

Having a book gives you almost instant credibility and instant authority and can get you on stages. So I build websites. Don't tell everybody that, but, and I'd be happy. I have a special deal. If you want to build an author or speaker or author slash speaker website, and also help you with marketing that website and getting your books sold, getting you speaking gigs, whatever it is you're looking for, I can help you with that. Anyway, since we don't seem to have people joining us today for a discussion, I think I'm going to let it go. 

Anyway, send me a note to gregdixon@sharedvisions.com. Make a comment wherever you see this, which could be on Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, that you would like to discuss, and my booking calendar is gregdixon.net/calendar. Anyway, send me a note. Let me know if you want to talk about help with your writing, you know, for one. 

I'm encouraging. The purpose of this thing here was to encourage people to come on, and we'll talk about writing topics, like how to brainstorm ideas, how to outline maybe, and then things to do with it, all sorts of brainstorming, all sorts of possibilities, and have a fun discussion about writing and publishing. 

So anyway, happy Saturday, everyone, and see you soon.