Category: The Writing Journey by Denise Colby

The Brand Challenge; Adding Book Pages To Your Website

I talked about a brand challenge a few months back to encourage you to try something new on your website to help you build content and SEO to support your brand. In this post I’m going to dive deeper with my suggestion to add book pages to your website.

First, were you able to do anything on the list from the first brand challenge? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments below.

Whether you did or did not, let’s try again!

It doesn’t have to be a lot of something, just one thing. Sort of like taking a small bite of the elephant. You don’t need to eat the entire elephant at one time. Many successful websites were not built in one month. They started somewhere first. Then changed or added pages or content later.

Last post, I gave generalized ideas, including adding book pages on your website. For this post, I’m going to expand on this idea. 

What type of book pages do you have on your website?

Similar to a blog post, having a page that is focused on one main idea, allows you to use it as a link in other content. This isn’t usually something we think about when building our website pages. Deep linking is adding links that direct the reader to a specific page, not just the front page of your website. The faster they click to the content they want, the happier they will be.

Ideas for pages on your website include a series book page and individual book pages on each book you publish. You can add where to buy for that specific book on the page, but there’s so much other content that can be connected to these pages.

Where to deep-link your book and series pages for brand building

Create a social media post or a blog post on any of the content below and include a direct link to the book or series page it represents.

• Make your characters come alive by talking about them outside of the story.
• Blog post or social media posts about the animals in your book (I have a rooster named Bert)
• Blog post or social media posts for your characters occupation
• Blog post or social media posts for the area or location in your stories (the one-room schoolhouse that was the inspiration to my story)

You can also add some of this content onto the book page itself to give additional context for your readers who choose to want to know more. It’s a way to connect with your readers or potential readers besides just the book.

Another option is to share research gathered for your stories. This could include research you weren’t able to add to your book but you’d like to share. Such when I learned about the first school-teacher who was trained from the school my heroine came from. So I wrote a blog post titled Harriet Bishop, First Public School Teacher in 1847

Frequent small steps add up over time

I know branding and dealing with your website can be challenging, I hope some of these ideas spark something for you to work with. Remember, your content doesn’t have to be perfect. It can even be something you decide to change later on. 

I encourage you to do one thing on this list above to help build your brand. It may not seem much. It may seem overwhelming, or underwhelming. But if you do one thing this month, and then another thing next month. Pretty soon, you’ll have many months of blog posts and content that you didn’t have before.

Sometimes we feel this urgency to hurry up that adds extra stress we don’t need as we are busy writing our next book. I’m hoping these ideas help propel you forward in your Author career.