The author website (or blog) is an essential book marketing tool, and authors often ask how they can get more traffic to their website. To answer that question, let’s first take a look at the ways that people land on websites.
In the graph below, you can see the sources of traffic (visitors) to my website last month, according to Google Analytics.
Search Traffic: About 47% of visitors found my site through a search engine like Google. Most of those people searched for keywords such as book marketing or book promotion, although some searched for my name or brand name. The process of making your site attractive to search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Referral Traffic: About 18% of visitors landed on my site by clicking a link on another website. Generating incoming links from other sites, including social networks, is a valuable way to get people to your site and it’s also helpful in SEO.
Direct Traffic: About 24% of visitors came directly to my site, either by typing my website address into their browser or clicking a link in an email (my newsletter). This also includes people who bookmarked my site in their browser and visited by clicking on the bookmark.
Campaigns: In this category, Google includes people who have subscribed to my RSS feed and clicked a link in the feed. If I were running any online ads on Google or another site, those visitors would also show up in this category.
I am writing a series of articles with more details on how to generate more traffic to author websites through search engines, incoming links and direct traffic. Stay tuned for the next installment coming next week. To make sure you don’t miss any posts on The Savvy Book Marketer, I invite you to sign up for the blog feed.
This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer. Also see Part 2 in this series.